


How The Day Sounds

by AlwaysLera



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers Book List, Celebrations, Clint Barton Doesn't Know How To Shop for the Holidays, Clint Barton Finds a Family, F/M, Gen, Holidays, Natasha Feels, Natasha Romanov Finds a Family, Natasha is a not so secret bookworm, Romantic Friendship, Team Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving, all the feels, birthday fic, finally get together, from beginning to end - Freeform, gratitude
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-11-15
Updated: 2013-11-28
Packaged: 2018-01-01 14:39:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 23,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1045114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlwaysLera/pseuds/AlwaysLera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For fourteen years, Clint and Natasha have done Thanksgiving together, no matter where they are. From Coulson's house to the Avengers Tower, from Tirana to a mountain somewhere on the Afghan/Pakistan border. Every year, it's a little more like family, a little closer to being home than either of them have every known. (1999-2013, one chapter a year).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1999

**Author's Note:**

> I kind of made up my own timeline for this. There are 14 days until Thanksgiving, I'll post a chapter a day, one for every year they've been doing Thanksgiving/Natasha's birthday together. With any luck, their relationship, friendship, and 'family' will grow with every year/chapter?
> 
> Endless fluff. Because don't we all need fluff heading into the holidays? Thanks for reading!

**Thanksgiving, 1999**

            They didn’t know her birthday, but when Natasha Romanov, previously known as Natalia Romanov or the Black Widow of Red Room fame, heard about the American holiday of Thanksgiving, she decided that she wanted that to be her birthday. This year, it’d be her eighteenth. Who was Clint Barton to disagree? It was a surprisingly sentimental move from the seventeen-going-on-thirty-year-old assassin turned spy who seemed disinclined to feeling, much less admitting, normal emotions.

(Whenever she met with the SHIELD psychologist, she described her emotional state as “Fine”. When the poor psychologist tried to suggest that “fine” was not, in fact, a feeling, she had calmly overturned his table and walked out of the room. He had chased after her, shouting that what she was feeling was anger and frustration.

She had shouted back over her shoulder, “No, I still feel fine.”

Coulson had elbowed Clint rather hard in the ribs when Clint couldn’t help laughing at the entire scene. Needless to say, no one asked Natasha about her emotions after that. Clint thought the psychologist was just an idiot. She didn’t need the words to explain what she was feeling. Clint could read it plain as day on her face. Maybe he spent more time with her than most people, but he knew when she was happy, or confused, or excited, or disappointed.)

Clint had come to SHIELD five years before she had, and he was not a fan of holidays. They only reminded him of lonely times, and what he didn’t have that most people had: a loving family. When she picked it as her birthday ( _“It’s a holiday about gratitude, Barton. I’m allowed to pick it as my birthday. It’s symbolic.”)_ , he had groaned inwardly. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to celebrate her birthday. It was that Clint could barely handle getting through a single holiday where he wasn’t expected to talk or socialize or act like he liked anyone. He only had to cope. And cope for a few hours he could do. Combining celebrations? Nope. He wanted no part of it.

Natasha had been with SHIELD for nine months, and had just been cleared to go into the field as his partner. It hadn’t taken nearly that long for him to realize that it was hard to say no to her. And there was no way in hell he was explaining why he was recalcitrant. If there was anyone who probably had it worse than Clint when it came to loneliness and family, it was Natasha.

For the last five years, Coulson had dragged Barton out of his apartment and to Coulson’s house in Williamsburg where the SHIELD misfits gathered for the holiday. They all brought a dish, those of the organization who had no other family. It had surprised Clint the first time. Turned out everyone he liked was just as homeless and orphaned in the world as he was.

There was Maria Hill, the sharp-eyed, keen and dry agent who seemed like she was on the accelerated path to leadership. There was Hanna Cross, the girl from Intel who wore the craziest earrings in the world, spoke a dozen languages or more, and baked the best cupcakes Clint had ever tasted. There was Joshua Darwin, another field agent like Clint, with a background not unlike Clint’s at all. Joshua had grown up in the Midwest with a traditional family. They kicked him out when they found out he was gay. He joined the Army in an attempt to recloset himself and found that he was an excellent sharpshooter. He left when Coulson made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: do his job, get paid more, and be as out as he wanted to be.

            Clint rather liked their misfit Thanksgivings, though he’d never admit it to Coulson. The more that group got together, the more the memories of past Thanksgivings which were less loving and less full of gratitude and good food faded in his mind. He just couldn’t take a lot on that day. If the others noticed he was unusually quiet and that he mostly stood at the oven, essentially watching his casserole cook, they didn’t say anything. The best thing about other misfits was that they understood the need to find one’s own space even in a crowded place.

            And there was Natasha, just adding to the festivities.

            “A birthday,” he growled under his breath, stalking up and down the rows of the bookstore, looking for a present. “I’ll have to _talk_.”

            “It’s Natasha,” Coulson repeated patiently, picking up a book and scanning the back cover. “She’s possibly the only person you don’t actually mind talking to.”

            “Other than you,” corrected Clint, picking up a book on Stalin and reading the back cover.

            “No. You are not getting her a book about Stalin. Put that back down.” Coulson plucked it from Clint’s hands and put it back on the shelf. “Books are for escapism, Barton. Think about what she might want to read that has nothing to do with her past or her career.”

            Clint frowned. “I don’t know.”

            Coulson picked up a book and shoved it into Clint’s hands. “This. This is what she wants, Clint. Go buy that.”

            Clint did. He had long ago discovered that Coulson’s advice was usually worth following. Not that Clint didn’t have relationships in which Coulson did not mettle, but very few of them were longstanding deep friendships like the one he was beginning to form with the violent little creature he fondly called Natashka. He was standing in line, reading the back of the cover of the book Coulson picked out, when she called him.

            “What time do I have to be there tomorrow?” She skipped the pretense of _hello, how are you, good, and you? Great. Cool, what’s up?_ Because it was Natasha and she didn’t do small talk. It was one of the reasons Clint liked her so much.

            “Um. Four?” Clint looked at Coulson for confirmation. Coulson shrugged. Clint would be there earlier watching his casserole cook. That was not a metaphor. “Four, yeah.”

            “Where are you?” Curiosity filled her tone. “I hear _people_.”

            He looked around the bookstore. “Lots of them. An absurd amount of them considering it’s two days until Black Friday. I’m at a bookstore.”

            “Why?”

            He looked at the book in his hands. “Getting you a birthday present.”

            Coulson muttered, “So much for a surprise.”

            Natasha made a delighted noise. Clint smiled a bit, relieved. “A present? Why?”

            “That’s what we do. We give presents.”

            “For Thanksgiving?”

            “No, for birthdays.” He looked up without seeing anything in front of him. “You didn’t do that in Russia?”

            There was a long pause and then her words came, heavily weighed. “Maybe they do that in Russia. I don’t know. We didn’t do it where I was.”

            Clint decided that the misery of going out into a crowded store, having to pick out a present, and being forced to be social tomorrow on what was now a double holiday would be worth it to give her her very first birthday present. “Well. New tradition. You get a birthday present.”

            “It’d be enough,” she said quietly, “just to have a new holiday about gratitude.”

            “I know,” he said, handing the clerk the book and his credit card. “It’d be enough. Enough falls short though, doesn’t it?”

            He heard the soft exhale of her breath through the phone. He had heard it before when they went on practice missions through the comm. units. She didn’t say much while Clint signed the receipt and took the bag, heading toward the door to wait for Coulson who had a large stack of books. Clint didn’t hang up and didn’t press Natasha for an answer.

            “See you tomorrow?” she asked finally.

            He nodded, and then cleared his throat. “Yes. Tomorrow.”

            Coulson insisted that he let the gift wrappers at the table by the door wrap the book. “I’ve seen the way you wrap presents, Barton. Just this once, will you let someone else make it look nice?”

            “I’m not trying to impress her,” argued Barton. “It’s Romanov. She’s never had a present before, or a birthday. I mean, honestly, it won’t take much. I could hand it to her in this bag.”

            “Just because you can,” Coulson said, smiling at the confused older woman wrapping the book, “doesn’t mean you should.”

            The next day, Clint watched Natasha come through the door, small and wary, wearing a navy blue dress that made her red hair and blue eyes stand out. He could see the outline of a knife in her belt and knew she was armed as much as she ever was. She scanned the room, her eyes running up and down the windows, over the doors, counting the exits. Her eyes met his and her mouth twitched a bit, a repressed smile.

            She crossed through the kitchen, unaware of the eyes following her, of the eyebrows raising when she stands in front of Clint. He wanted to glare at the others, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away from her. “I heard you make a sweet potato casserole.”

            He pointed to the oven. “Don’t touch. It’s hot.”

            “Thanks, Captain Obvious.” She tilted her head slightly. “I am thankful that you are really bad at shooting with your left arm, in the dark, over six hundred meters, with a concussion.”

            He couldn’t stop the grin. “We share our gratitudes before dinner, kitten.”

            “Say kitten again and you’ll be grateful you still have your balls,” she answered without blinking an eye.

            Maria snorted behind her and said, “Watch out, Romanoff. I’m about to stuff a bird.”

            It wasn’t such a bad Thanksgiving, for all of Clint’s trepidation about how much would be required of him in a single day. Besides, he got to force Natasha to watch her first football game.

            “You’re an American now!” he said gleefully.

            She stared at the screen. “Now I know why the rest of the world thinks Americans are cultural vaccuums.”

            Maria pointed a finger at her. “Insult the Saints again and we’re going to have words. I don’t care how many people you’ve killed with your thighs.”

            “Oh,” said Clint, like that reminded him. He got up and found the bag with the wrapped book by the door. He shoved it in Natasha’s general direction. “Present.”

            She hesitated, then took it with careful hands. She raised her eyebrow at him, asking permission, and he shrugged, shifting his weight anxiously from foot to foot. She carefully pulled out the book from the bag, turning it over and examining the skiing snowmen wrapping paper. She set down the bag and unwrapped the book with nimble, slow moving fingers. Clint was caught in a trance by her.

            “Mistborn,” she said carefully, reading the title. “By Brandon Sanderson. Is it good?”

            “I don’t know,” Clint admitted shyly. “Not much of a reader. Coulson helped me pick it out.”

            Natasha’s eyes never lifted from the book. “Thank you.”

            He smiled. “Happy birthday, Natasha.”

            “Happy Thanksgiving, Clint.”

He was grateful, without knowing exactly why.            


	2. Thanksgiving, 2000

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thanksgiving, 2000.

“We’re late, we’re late, we’re late,” Clint chanted under his breath, hopping around his bedroom trying to pull on his socks. It was difficult with broken fingers and did not help distract him from the fact that someone had broken his hands. His career was his hands. And his eyes. He’d be fucked in so many ways he did not have the emotional capacity to calculate if he lost full use of his hands or his eyes.

“Barton,” Natasha said, appearing in his doorway. “Stop. Sit down. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

“I’m already hurt,” he muttered, sitting down and glaring at his splinted fingers.

“It’s not the end of the world.” She knelt and pulled his socks up, pushed his shoes onto his feet, and tied them deftly. “Though if you can’t figure out how to ask for help, I’m getting you Velcro shoes.”

He stopped staring at his fingers and stared up at her in horror. “You wouldn’t.”

Her eyes were wide and innocent. “Test me.”

He’d really rather not. They had been in the field for seven months together, the first long mission they had been sent on since Natasha came to SHIELD almost two years ago. He had worked next to her long enough to personally know exactly what she looked like at any given time during an interrogation or when she was torturing someone for information. As far as Clint was concerned, Velcro shoes were right up there with some of her worst techniques. He’d like to keep his shoes and his fingernails and his eardrums, thank you very much.

“I’m good,” he said, nudging her with a foot. “Thanks, Nat.”

She gave him a shadow of a smile, the kind she reserved for when she really meant it. A wide smile spelled trouble. Just most people didn’t know that. Clint liked the idea that he knew that now. She rose and slipped back down the hall, leaving his door open behind her, just as she had found it. Clint watched her retreat and wondered, briefly, if she was alright. She had been eerily quiet since they came back that morning, stomping back to their respective rooms to sleep in real beds for the first time in months, and rising only because it was Thanksgiving, and thus her birthday, and they were needed at the House of Coulson’s Misfit Children.

The shoes were the biggest problem. He just pulled a fleece over his head on top of the t shirt he had slept in. Easier if nothing had buttons right then. He mussed up his hair with his splinted hands and wandered down the hall, swinging his keys by a forefinger. He knocked at Natasha’s closed door.

“Come in!” she yelled. He opened the door and she glanced over her shoulder at him, fastening her shirt at the back of the neck by a pearl button. Clint really didn’t understand why women put themselves in clothing that fastened in the back. He barely caught Natasha’s eyeroll before he realized he spoke aloud and she said, “It’s not for us. It’s for the people who unbutton us at the end of the night.”

Clint blinked at her, and then frowned. “Who you taking home?”

“No one but myself. Who said I can’t have fun by myself?” Natasha said, watching his expression from the mirror she faced. Her expression dipped towards coy and flirtatious, but Clint ignored that purposefully, ignored the heat she could stir up in his veins, ignored the way she was pushing back at him. She slipped earrings into both holes of her lower lobes. Clint watched her curiously. Last time she had shown up rather casual. Tonight she was wearing a sapphire top that fastened in the back with pearl buttons she said were for someone else, skinny black pants that might as well have been spandex for all Clint cared, and boots with heels that could have doubled as weapons.

She looked like she was going on a mission.

Clint frowned and stepped forward a bit, and Natasha’s eyes narrowed at him. He stood still in his tracks. He usually shoved his hands in his pockets but he couldn’t with the splint. Strange, the way he had to find new habits to do with his hands. He crossed his arms instead. She was his partner, but he knew better than to push her. There were edges of Natasha that he didn’t know and didn’t want to know about. It was easier when they were mirrors for each other.

“Ready?” she asked, turning around. She was beautiful. He knew she heard it enough. She had just gotten done playing a socialite in Slovenia for seven months. She heard endlessly—and he too through the mike she wore—how beautiful she was. He was pretty sure that she knew exactly what effect she had with her hair all tousled and loose curls below her shoulders, uncut for that mission, and her silver earrings and her sapphire blouse.

He said, “Ten bucks says you’re going to get gravy on that shirt.”

“I refuse to take that bet. You cheat.” She took the keys from him. “Only people capable of tying shoelaces should drive.”

“First off, you’re not even wearing shoes that have laces. And secondly, you don’t have your license.” He snatched for the keys that she held away from him. She locked the door behind him and gave him a searing glare. He shook his head. “You don’t intimidate me. I’m driving.”

“It’s a manual. Can you even shift?”

“Trust me, kitten,” he said with a wink, “My hand can still work the shaft.”

The corner of her lip turned up a bit. “Well played.”

Clint puffed out his chest. “Thank you.”

“You’re not driving.”

“Goddammit, woman.”

“First because you called me kitten. Second because you called me woman. Get in, Barton.”

\--

They arrived late, as they knew they would be, and everyone else was there, setting the table, drinking, and laughing. Clint took the keys from Natasha and shoved them in his jacket pocket as they walked up the driveway. Natasha nudged him with her elbow. “Hey. Stop worrying about your hand. It’s going to heal fine.”

He didn’t know why it pleased him so much that she knew exactly why his mind was preoccupied. He elbowed her back. “I will if you tell me when you’re having trouble coming down out of a mission next time.”

She blinked rapidly, her mouth opening as Clint turned the doorknob and pushed open the door. Natasha turned, back to the festivities, so only Clint could see her open, startled expression. But then her eyes blinked again, and a coy sparkle grew in them, splitting her face. “What? You don’t think I look good?”

Clint shut the door behind them, touching her elbow and tugging at the collar of her coat to slide it off her arms. “You look beautiful.”

He had just enough time to see her face cloud over in confusion again before she was whisked away by a delighted Maria Hill happy to see her, and Coulson arrived in the foyer with a beer already cracked open for Clint.

Clint drove home, hours later, with Natasha dozing off in the passenger seat. She never would have fallen asleep in a car with him a year ago and he couldn’t decide if he ought to be proud of himself or her for that achievement. He parked at the base underground garage and got out of the car. The door noise startled her away instantly and she was standing up and stretching. They walked in together, silent but comfortable, meandering the halls of the residential part of the base until they reached Clint’s apartment first.

“I got something for you,” he remembered quickly. He opened the door and flicked on the lights, hurrying to his bedside table. He returned to the doorway and held out a wrapped book for Natasha. “Happy birthday.”

She gave him a sleepily delighted smile and said, “Can I unwrap it?”

He tried to put his hands in his pocket and crossed them instead. “Um, sure. I hope you like it.”

“We Shall Wear Midnight,” read Natasha. Her fingers caressed the cover. “Terry Pratchett.”

“I loved his Discworld books,” mused Clint, running a hand through his hair sheepishly. “I figured it’d be an easy read compared to our daily routine.”

Natasha held it to her chest and smiled at him. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” he said, hoping his fondness didn’t leak into his voice. “See you tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” she nodded, and took a step backward. Then uncertainty flitted across her features. “Wait. Clint.”

He paused, opening the door wide again and leaning on the doorway. She looked at him, and then past him into his apartment. “I didn’t realize I was struggling to come out of mission mode until you said that today.”

Clint studied her closely and said, “You dressed up. Wore earrings. Tried to flirt with me. You were still playing Aliya from Slovenia.”

Natasha gave him a sad smile. “She was easier to be than Natasha Romanov from nowhere.”

Clint shrugged. “I like Natasha Romanov better. It’ll get easier.”

“Okay.” She looked down at the book. “I’m going to go back and read this.”

“Get some sleep, Nat,” he called after her as she walked down the hall.

“Dream of me, Barton,” she called back over her shoulder. He grinned. 


	3. 2001

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thanksgiving, 2001

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Characters' political opinions are their own and do not necessarily reflect my own opinions.

“So when your people invaded Afghanistan in the ‘80’s—“

“They aren’t my people, Barton.”

“They’re your people.”

“I was not a part of the Afghanistan invasion. You might remember it ended poorly for us.”

“Yeah, only because we finally figured out what to do about the Hind helicopters.”

“Worked out really well for the Americans, didn’t it? They’re using the same weapons to bring down your helicopters now.”

“They’re your helicopters now too.”

“I think it’s interesting when Americans use the plural personal possessive and when they do not.”

“What?”

“You were not part of the operation in the ‘80s here.”

“No.”

“But you said ‘we’ figured out what to do about the Hind helicopters. In reality, it was a bunch of stuffy white men in suits in Washington realizing that Stinger missiles could be given to the Taliban to shoot down—“

“They weren’t the Taliban yet.”

“They basically were. To shoot down Hind helicopters because the Cold War had found a new theater.”

“And got, for the first time, literally cold. All those years wasted playing a Cold War out in Africa and they finally realized—it was never going to get cold there. So they moved it to Central Asia.”

“You’re right, Barton. That’s exactly what happened. You’re a genius.”

“Damn straight.”

“You Americans will claim anything in your history that turned out positive as something you personally were involved in. You said you were a part of the decision to arm the Afghan rebels with Stinger missiles.”

“I said we, but I meant those guys. And we. Okay, whatever.”

“But when you talk about Vietnam, you say, “They” when you mean America.”

“What’s your point?”

“At least in Russia, we own all our mistakes.”

“That’s because you’re proud of your mistakes over there, Nat. Saying that you were a part of a genocide isn’t owning a mistake. It’s saying you’re glad you were a part of a machine that killed millions before you were born.”

“Maybe. Or maybe it’s saying that we’re infallible creatures, that we’re imperfect and pick imperfect people to lead us.”

“So Stalin’s problem was imperfection.”

“Wasn’t it?”

“He was a psychopath.”

“Sociopath. Narcissistic sociopath.”

“Are there altruistic sociopaths?”

“George W. Bush?”

“Easy, there.”

“I realize his popularity’s through the roof right now but, Barton, you have to admit that--,”

“I’ve got movement on the path.”

“Copy that.”

“How many?”

“Six trucks. I got pictures of the plates. You see that second truck? Passenger seat? That look like our mark?”

“It’s hard to tell.”

“Well guarded enough to be. These guys are packing.”

“RPGs. They’re carrying the shit that’s taking down our guys.”

“We don’t have permission to do anything other than take out our guy, Barton.”

“I can’t tell you it’s not our guy.”

“Not good enough.”

“Fuck your rules, Nat. These guys blew up the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and now they’re running up into the mountains to take down a helicopter.”

“Barton.”

“Fuck you.”

“I got photos of everyone I could in the trucks before they turned the path.”

“Jesus Christ. I have six hundred meters to make a call.”

“It’s not your call. We’re out here for one guy.”

“It could be him.”

“We could start a shitstorm of trouble if it’s not.”

“You think anyone will miss that guy if I shoot him? Doubtful. Even if he’s not bin Laden’s doctor, he’s a terrorist.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do. What the hell else are you doing out here with trucks?”

“You don’t know that he’s a terrorist, Barton. Do not take that shot.”

“Three hundred meters.”

“It’s not your call.”

“Natasha.”

“Barton.”

“He’s a terrorist.”

“Killing him isn’t going to bring back all those people, Barton.”

“Fuck you. How would you know?”

“They’re my people too, now. Who died that day.”

“Two hundred meters.”

“It’s not our call. Our mission is clear. Don’t compromise it.”

“Those guys could plan another attack.”

“Yes.”

“One hundred meters.”

“We’re looking for the guy who is taking care of the person who is actually responsible. He’s our mark. We’ll stay out here in the snow until we get him. And I promise you, Clint, we’ll get him.”

“Fifty meters.”

“An eye for an eye will make the world go blind.”

“Out of range.”

“Barton.”

“Those were some words from a fucking assassin. You know how many innocent lives you took, Nat?”

“No.”

“A lot. We couldn’t even count your kills. And here you are, spouting off fucking Mother Theresa bullshit at me.”

“It was Ghandi.”

“Like you’re one to talk. You’re made to make the world blind.”

 

“Shit. Tasha. I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

“No, I mean it. I didn’t mean to be a shithead.”

“You’re upset.”

“Yeah.”

“You couldn’t have saved him, Clint. You couldn’t have gotten him off the plane. It wasn’t your responsibility. And killing a guy driving a truck won’t bring him back.”

“I know.”

“Our mission is good. Our mission’s honorable. This is what we’re supposed to do. We can’t kill without justification on some basis that someone must be terrible because they belong to the same machine as terrible people. That would make us just like the people who flew planes into the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon. Does that make sense?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m going to hold that for you until you can hold it.”

“I just want to be able to tell his wife I did something.”

“I want you to tell his wife that you did something good.”

“Shit.”

“I’m coming back up. We need food.”

“I thought I was done with MREs.”

“Never. Food of gods.”

“You and I think of MREs differently.”

“Here. Turkey.”

“Oh man. It’s Thanksgiving.”

“Happy Thanksgiving, Clint.”

“Happy birthday, Natasha. Good birthday?”

“I have snow down my pants.”

“You’re so hot it probably melted.”

“I feel like that’s a pick up line that only works if you’re a field agent laying in snow in the Afghan mountains. Very limited population for you to try it on.”

“I guess. This shit’s good. So. David.”

“Yes.”

“During Desert Storm, we were up on this ridge waiting for a convoy, not unlike this one. He was marking for me. Except we had this game because it was so fucking boring to wait where we’d come up with all the crazy things we could make out of a goat.”

“What?”

“We were bored. And there were goats. Limited imagination.”

“I thought you guys would talk about porn or something.”

“Getting a hard-on while you’re supposed to be looking down a scope for a high priority target is not a fun experience.”

“How are you coping right now then?”

“Funny, Nat.”

“I thought you’d like that. So. Things you could make out of a goat.”

“Like the meat and such. We’d be up there practically salivating onto our gloves—and let me tell you, Iraq got fucking cold at night sometimes, okay?—dreaming about goat and butternut squash.”

“Is this story going somewhere?”

“Shut up. So anyway, when we got our kill and headed back to base, we came across a goat herd. Totally unmarked. No bells or brands. So we took a goat.”

“PETA hates you, Barton.”

“Oh fuck them. So we took this goat and we killed it. Nice and clean, humane like. And we paid an absurd amount for a local squash and some spices. We took it home and between the unit, some guy had a large pot—I mean, who the fuck goes to war with a pot, right?—and some other dude actually knew how to skin a goat. We roasted goat meat, squash, and spices that night. We hadn’t had a meal that wasn’t out of a box in weeks. Best meal I ever had.”

“Okay now I’m hungry for real food.”

“Yeah. I know. I’m sorry. Anyway, when David was on that plane, and it was all hijacked, he texted me. I hadn’t heard from him in months.”

“Clint.”

“What?”

“You didn’t tell me he texted you.”

“Yeah. It said, “Eating goat with you and the guys that night was the best night of my life. I know we haven’t talked but I wanted you to know.””

“Oh, Clint.”

“Don’t say it like that.”

“I’m not saying it any way. I’m glad he texted you.”

“Me too.”

“He went into the North Tower?”

“Yeah. I didn’t even know what was happening when I got that. I understood the text about three minutes later when someone came down the hall and said to turn on the news. The base alarm went off a few minutes later.”

“You couldn’t have stopped the plane, Clint. I know you’re a great pilot and I know you’re a great marksman, but you couldn’t have stopped the plane.”

“I know.”

“Okay.”

“I was just thinking.”

“Okay.”

“Maybe when we get home, I should invite a couple of those guys around and we can have goat and drink beers.”

“You should. Do you know how to get a hold of them all?”

“A few of them. We can probably put most of us back together. Not all of us are still here. I mean, David’s gone. But AJ’s gone too. Shot himself a few months after we got back. And Keegan’s in jail.”

“You’re still here.”

“I am.”

“I’m glad you are.”

“Thanks, Tasha.”

“Get some shut eye. I’ll take first watch.”

“You warm enough?”

“I’m good.”

“Alright. Wake me in two hours.”

“I will.”

“Night, Tasha.”

“Night, Clint.”

“Tash. I didn’t mean it. What I said. I know that you’re as American as the rest of us now. I know that what happened on September 11th hit you as hard as any of us.”

“It probably didn’t hit me as hard as some of you, to be honest. I know that. It doesn’t mean that I don’t feel that pain as acutely.”

“I know.”

“I think that David would be proud of you. For what it’s worth. I know I didn’t know him. But you turned out alright, Barton. You’ve made good calls.”

“He’d be telling me to shut the fuck up right about now.”

“Smart man.”

“Funny. Okay. Night.”

“Night.”

“Tash.”

“What, Barton?”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was surprisingly hard to write, though I normally love the exercise of a dialogue only piece. I got way more emotional than I intended.


	4. 2002

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thanksgiving, 2002

Clint closed his eyes, letting Natasha’s fingers ghost along his throat as she tied his tie in what she called a shell knot but what seemed like a mostly unnecessary knot. He was going to complain that he could tie a half Windsor and a full Windsor and for twenty six years of his life, that did him just fine, thank you very much, but then: her fingers, the proximity of her, the smell of that rosewater perfume he bought her for Christmas last year when they got back from Afghanistan. He knew that if he opened his eyes, then there’d be Natasha with her dark lashes beating like a careful heartbeat against the top ridge of her cheekbones and her mouth slightly parted in concentration.

He didn’t dare open his eyes.

“Twenty one,” he managed to say, and talking made her hands still.

She tugged at the knot, slid her tightened fingers right up to his now-tight throat, and touched his chest with a flat palm. She had been doing that a lot lately, the careful but purposeful touches. “I can buy you a beer at a bar tomorrow.”

“We should be going out tonight,” he grumbled a little, peeking at her as she stepped away. “Why’d we pick Thanksgiving again?”

She gave him an amused look over her shoulder as she walked to her vanity. “I picked it. And I don’t mind. It’s not like alcohol’s a novelty.”

It was true. She had been drinking on base where the age was eighteen since she arrived and she always had a glass of wine, or two, at Thanksgiving with the rest of crowd. Clint sat on the edge of the bed, watching her in her chair carefully apply mascara. She looked as beautiful, and as untouchable, as she ever did. Coulson had decided this year that everyone should dress up a little bit to make it different from the other times the same group got together.

Maria Hill’s email back had included choice words. And Clint’s argument was that he and Natasha spent their careers dressing up and pretending to be social in strangely awkward social situations. They wanted a place where they didn’t have to be like that. Coulson didn’t care. He told Maria to mind her manners and he told Clint that he wasn’t asking for anyone to show up in a tux.

“Button-down shirt, clean pants, clean shoes for the gentlemen or so inclined. Dresses and skirts for the ladies, or the so inclined,” Coulson had said firmly. “It’s not rocket science. It’s a nice dinner. Let’s dress up for it.”

Natasha insisted she didn’t mind. Then again, Natasha was always more comfortable dressing up than he was. Clint still watched her with a keen eye. They were between assignments and she had gotten roughed up a bit the last go around. It was rare that anyone got a hand on her and he could still see the fading bruises around her bare forearms. She wore a green sheath dress and gold jewelry this go-around. Maria was coming up with a theory that Natasha’s dresses were like a mood ring. Clint wondered what green meant.

“You going to stare at me all night?” Her question held no venom. It was a question freely asked.

He shrugged. “Maybe.”

Her gaze skipped sideways a few beats and rested on him, a smile on her lips. “You look good in a tie, Barton.”

“They are instruments of torture.” He touched the knot on his throat. It was suffocating, really. It was only still there because she tied it and she’d kill him if he untied it. “Not to mention, entirely unsafe.”

She brushed back her hair and twisted it on the back of her head, sliding in two chopsticks to hold it. Clint shook his head. She was never unarmed. Those chopsticks were a gift from Coulson. They were also very thin blades, strong enough to slit throats, slim enough to go undetected even when she had to be searched out in the field on assignment.

“No one’s going to grab it and choke you at this party,” she said. “Think Maria’s going to be wearing heels?”

Clint squinted at her. “Why the hell would I know that?”

“Text her.”

“Nat, I’m not texting Maria to ask what shoes she’s wearing. That’s weird.”

Natasha frowned at him and fuck him if she wasn’t just as gorgeous when she was confused and annoyed. “Why? Afraid of being the guy with a shoe fetish?”

“Uh, yeah. You’d be too.” He stood as she stood. “Wear a jacket.”

“My bare shoulders offending you?” she asked. “Too much time in the Middle East?”

He slipped his arms into the sleeves of his jacket. “Not at all. I do like seeing your hair again, though.”

“I’m driving,” she said, shaking car keys out of her pocket. She put her jacket on before she slipped her feet into heels that made her taller than Clint. She pat the top of his head. “I should wear these more often.”

“If you want to shorten your lifespan,” he grumbled. “It’s snowing outside, Natasha. You’re seriously wearing these? If you break your ankle.”

“Did you always worry this much? I don’t remember that.” They marched down the hallway, her shoes loud and determined.

He shrugged, slipping into the passenger seat of her car. “Probably. Now I just say it aloud. Does it bother you?”

She started the car and stared at the dash. There was a long pause and he watched her out of the corner of his eye as he buckled his seatbelt and turned on the seat warmer. Her face was unusually still and then she pressed her lips together, one of her more subtle tells of frustration and confusion. He reached over and flicked one of her long dangling earrings to distract her, and it worked. She knocked his hand away and peeled out of the SHIELD base.

They argued over the radio the whole way to Coulson’s house and as they pulled into the driveway, Natasha said, “It doesn’t bother me.”

“What doesn’t?” He looked around, frowning.

“That you worry. I like that you worry.” She was staring at the dash again like the odometer was a particularly troublesome puzzle. She took a deep breath. “No one worried about me. Before.”

Clint wanted to reach out and touch her so badly that he had to force himself to be still and quiet, like he was in a nest waiting for a mark to appear in his scope, for a long moment. Every inch of his body ached for this woman, the survivor, the brave, the courageous creature in the driver’s seat.

“Good,” he said lightly, unlocking the door. “I should warn you, I’m going to need a phone call when you get home every night. Don’t forget to lock your doors.”

“Shove it, Barton,” she said warningly as she slammed the door behind her and teetered on her too high heels up the path. She opened the door and they walked into the party.

There were a few new people. Sitwell. Carpenter. Jonas. Rivera. Askolov. All people Clint liked and knew. Someone pressed a beer into Clint’s hand and he searched the crowd for Natasha who held up her own bottle. They did cheers across the distance over everyone’s heads, passing each other very small smiles that did not go unnoticed by others. Clint went into the kitchen, helping Coulson with the bird and the oven, before getting started on the casserole dish.

“You didn’t make it ahead of time?” Coulson frowned at Clint who was digging through cabinets. “Dinner’s in two hours.”

“Plenty of time. I was distracted. I had to run out to the bookstore,” Clint muttered, searching for and eventually finding a metal pan. He set it on the counter and clapped his hands together. “How’s work?”

“Fine except I have this pair of excellent agents who always complete all of their mission objectives, but never turn in their debrief reports. It’s like a straight A student who doesn’t turn in the homework they’ve already done. Mindboggling,” Coulson said dryly.

“Nat!” yelled Clint.

“What!” she yelled back from another room.

Clint ignored the pointed eyerolls of everyone else. “Coulson’s giving me shit in here. It was your fucking turn to turn in the reports!”

“I’ll do it,” she called back, sounding closer. She poked her red head in the kitchen. “I have to double check a few things.”

“Uh huh,” said Coulson, frowning at a thermometer in the bird. “I’ve heard that before.”

“Would it make it better if I offered to set the turkey on fire?” she suggested. “It’ll cook faster that way.”

Coulson lifted his eyes and fixed Natasha with a look that made her grin and Clint fidget for fear that his partner was about to be killed. “I’m good. But thank you. Are you being nice to Chloe?”

“Chloe?” repeated Clint carefully.

“Bergen,” Coulson added, looking at Natasha again. “Short dark hair out there. She’s new. Junior agent. She didn’t have family to do Thanksgiving with. I want to bring her into our crew but…”

“You need us to be nice,” Clint supplied. “All of us, or just Natasha and I?”

“I don’t worry about the others,” Coulson said dryly. “Open the over.”

Clint obeyed and Natasha said, “Well, shit, Coulson. You got him trained and everything. How come he doesn’t do anything I say in the field?”

“You two needs couples therapy,” muttered Maria, coming in to refill her wine glass.

Coulson sighed. “I’ll tell you Clint’s secrets if you’re nice to the new girl.”

“Deal,” Natasha said, sticking out her hand instantly. She downed the rest of her beer and set the empty bottle on the counter as she and Coulson shook on it over Clint’s protestations. She slid around the island, brushing past Clint who was glaring at her. “I want something else to drink.”

“Are you letting me drive your car home?” asked Clint, forgetting the deal for a second while he watched her make herself a gin and tonic at the makeshift bar.

“Sure,” she said lazily, and he wondered if the beer was not in fact her first drink for the night. She downed a shot of gin right away, and then poured more gin and tonic into the water. She drank a little and gave Clint a heady look. He swallowed. She said, “I taste like Christmas now.”

Clint had to get out of the kitchen. He shoved the casserole at her. “Stick this in for thirty minutes. Don’t burn yourself.”

She was pouting when he sat down on the stairs, head in his hands, and tried to clear his brain of Natasha tipsy and seducing him. It was hard to forget. It was harder to say no, even from there at the front of the house on the stairs. Eventually he heard people arguing over the bird and knew he should go back in and supervise the carving of the turkey.

Coulson scowled when Clint wandered in to the kitchen. “I don’t need a babysitter.”

“You removed half your thumb last year,” Clint reminded him mildly, “when we weren’t here.”

“I’m not going to remove my finger,” Coulson argued.

“It’s never occurred to anyone that buying presliced turkey would be easier?” asked Natasha curiously, sipping at red wine.

Coulson and Clint said at the same time, “Tradition.”

Natasha shrugged a little. “Tradition worth losing your hand over?”

“Maybe,” Coulson said, so seriously that Natasha shut up right away.

She was flushed at dinner, as were many others, but she fell entirely serious as they went around the table to share their gratitudes. Clint said softly, “To be home this year.”

Coulson’s eyes were a little bit brighter than normal. Clint knew it was because he called this home. It wasn’t particularly true. Clint didn’t know what home felt like at all. But he imagined it was a place to come back to no matter how fast or slow the world was spinning and how mad the universe seemed outside the doors of the house. So by those standards, Coulson’s house was as close as Clint figured he’d get in his lifetime. Kids like Clint didn’t get homes like this without a lot of luck on their side.

When it came time for Natasha’s gratitude, she said instantly, “I’m grateful to be legally able to drink in public.” And when the laughter died down, she said, with more caution than her first gratitude, “To be with people who trust me.”

Clint’s tie felt a little tight around his throat. He reached out with his foot to kick her, and kicked Sitwell instead. The entire table snickered when Sitwell called him on it and they all knew Clint had been aiming for Natasha anyway.

On the drive home, Natasha leaned over and untied Clint’s tie. “You’re alright to drive?”

Not particularly, if she kept touching him. Clint kept his eyes on the road. “Better than you, sweetheart.”

“I can drink a lot and be okay,” she argued, sinking back onto her seat, turning over the silk tie in her hands. He watched her out of the corner of his eye twine it around her wrists. He cleared his throat and looked straight forward again. She sighed. “I like going there but it felt like a lot of people tonight.”

He glanced over at her. “You alright?”

“Yeah,” she replied, noncommittally. She rested her head on the window. “What are you doing tomorrow?”

“Nothing. You?” he turned into the base.

“Want to come over and watch the West Wing?” Her tone was unusually careful and shy.

He parked her car next to his and tossed her the keys which she caught easily. “Sure. Just call me when you’re awake.”

 She nodded as they walked back into base together, shoulders bumping into one another and they pretended not to notice. At Clint’s door, Natasha sagged against the doorframe and Clint watched her with obvious concern. She didn’t open her eyes when she smiled and said, “See. You did stare at me all night.”

“You’re easy on the eyes,” he teased her. “Hold on. Tradition.”

She opened her eyes as he pressed a book into her hands. She opened it up and read the title. “Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. I thought you didn’t like him.”

“Dick of a person. Genius of a writer. Unfortunate how those things pan out sometimes.”

“I’ll like it?” She regarded the book with suspicion.

“I think so. Have I steered you wrong yet?”

She shook her head. “No. I thought maybe I’d get the 9-11 Commission Report, honestly.”

“It was on the short list but this looked like it fit in a jump vest.”

The look she gave him, shy and curious and excited, was worth every moment he dragged himself around that bookstore way too early this morning with way too many people. She held the book to her chest and backed down the hallway. He stood in his own doorway and watched her until he heard her door clicked shut. That woman was going to be the death of him, he swore. 


	5. 2003

Clint slid the casserole into the oven and checked his phone. Again. The screen was still blank, some default blue ocean shit it came with because he couldn’t risk taking a picture with a phone that was, for all intents and purposes, just a burn phone. Except that right then, it wasn’t just a burn phone. He didn’t intend to drop that one in a toilet and then stick it in a microwave and whatever else clever ideas he’s had with phones in the past. This time it’s a burn phone because of the incoming call that hasn’t come yet.

“A watched pot never boils,” Coulson said, handing off a mixing bowl to Chloe across the counter.

Clint scowled at him. “I’m not looking at a pot.”

“Metaphor, Barton,” said Hill. She swished her wine around in the glass and took a sip. “She’s fine. She’s always fine. The entire Chinese army could be coming down around her head and she’d be fine.”

“I didn’t say she wasn’t fine.” He just would rather hear from her. Natasha had been sent largely by herself into a corporation in China where she was in a long term deep cover project. Almost all of their correspondence over the last three months had been through Sitwell then through Coulson, and that’d continue for at least another three months, potentially six more months. It wasn’t like SHIELD let Clint sit idle on his hands. They knew better than that.

Coulson had said dryly to him, “Idle hands makes Clint Barton a dangerous toy.”

He wasn’t wrong. Clint was conducting the tests for all of SHIELD’s new sharpshooters over the next couple of days, and then he was heading for Argentina, then Madrid, then Cape Town. He liked Cape Town for a lot of reasons. He disliked Cape Town for a lot of reasons. Mostly he really wished that wherever he was was wherever she was. He hadn’t expected to struggle this much. The last time she went in a long deep cover, he went in with her and was covering her. They didn’t call it handling her because if they were totally honest, no one really _handled_ Natasha. They managed her. Kept her from doing anything stupid. She was level-headed, professional, and reliable in the field these days. So no one was in with her. She made all her check ins with the local SHIELD office that Sitwell was heading and passed on all the information as requested.

Clint had nothing to complain about. She was doing her job. SHIELD was doing its job. It’d be so much easier if this wasn’t going so fucking well. He scowled at his phone again. They had hoped she’d be able to get away and place a call to him, but she couldn’t take any unnecessary risks with this mission. Clint hadn’t been read into it and he knew better than to ask Natasha. She wouldn’t tell him.

“Loose lips sink ships.” Clint had heard old women in his hometown growing up say that, but Natasha was also a fan of the saying. He had argued that his lips weren’t loose, and there were no ships.

And she had said to him, just as Hill had said, “Metaphor, Barton.”

He had jokingly replied, “I never met a four I didn’t like.”

She had given him the type of smile she gave marks when she was humoring them. That had left an unsettling feeling in his stomach.

Coulson had a new dart board and Clint wasn’t allowed to play, but he sulked over his beer and placed bets in Hill’s favor. She gave him a crooked smile and shook her head at him, but his faith was well placed. He won sixty bucks on her. Adams, Chloe, and Darwin scowled at her, and him, in turns. Hanna Cross opened another beer using the windowsill and tipped the neck of her bottle against Clint’s.

“To not only being the best sniper in the whole damn org,” she said, laughing, “but to knowing your competition and runner up.”

“I’d lose to Hawkeye even if his hands were bound behind his back,” Hill said, looking like she wasn’t sure if Hanna’s words were a compliment or insult.

Clint paused, his beer resting on his lips. He hadn’t thought of trying that. He wondered if he could throw a dart in a different way with comparable results. “Huh.”

“Stop using my windowsills to open your drinks. This isn’t base. You aren’t heathens. Use a bottle opener. Clint, pianos are to be played, not sat on. And no one give him any ideas about trying to throw darts with his mouth.” Coulson stood in the doorway. “Dinner in twenty.”

Clint slid off the top of the piano and into the seat, setting his beer down. He ran his fingers up and down the scales and gave Coulson a raised eyebrow. Coulson had been one of the only people who knew Clint knew how to play. Now the rest of the Misfits knew too. Coulson gave him a small smile and finished drying his hands on a towel, disappearing back into the kitchen. Clint made a mental note to get Coulson one of those terrible cooking aprons that were made to look like a naked woman. That would be hilarious. He and Nat could get a kick out of that. Clint began to play whatever music was sitting on the piano at the time, pausing only occasionally. Sight reading, to absolutely no one’s surprise, was one of his strengths.

Hanna kicked him and held out his phone. “Piano man. Your phone’s ringing.”

Clint nearly fell off the piano bench, picking up the call. “Hi.”

She sounded breathless on the other end. “Happy Thanksgiving.”

Clint moved away from the piano and the too knowing, too curious eyes of his fellow misfits. “Happy birthday. You sound tired.”

“Exhausted,” she said, and yawned. “You realize that it’s four in the morning here right? And I had to go for a run up a mountain to get service and away from prying eyes and ears.”

“All out of your love for me,” he teased her.

“You overestimate my adoration of you. Who have you insulted so far?”

“Potentially Hill. I can’t tell.” He looked over his shoulder and they were all staring at him. “They’re all looking at me.”

“Tell them that they need to go away so we can have phone sex.”

Clint tripped over his own foot trying to cross into the foyer. “What?”

Natasha snorted. “I was kidding, Barton.”

Clint’s chest was tight when he tried to breathe. “Oh. Right. Yeah.”

She was quiet for a long time. “I should be home for baseball spring training.”

He laughed a little, scuffing his foot against Coulson’s obnoxiously cheerful welcome mat. “You thought that was the most boring thing in the world.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” she objected. “It’d be more fun if you know.”

He grinned and looked out the window at the frost-bitten grass. “If there were explosions and people to seduce and play and things were on fire.”

“Little bit.”

He leaned his forehead against the glass. “Miss you.”

“Miss you too,” she said softly, surprising him. She sighed. “I should go. They’ll notice that my run took longer.”

“See you soon.” He made himself not say anything more.

“Ciao, Barton,” she said, and the line went dead.

When Hill came to get him for dinner, Clint held up a finger and said, “Not a word, Hill.”

To his surprise, Hill’s tone was gentle. “Wouldn’t dream of it. She’s alright?”

He shrugged, then nodded. “She’s fine.”

“Come to dinner, Barton,” Hill said after a moment.

“In a moment,” Clint said, and stayed at the window for a few more minutes. 


	6. 2004

Clint woke late on Thanksgiving morning, stretched out on his couch, impossibly warm for being barefoot and without a blanket. He inhaled carefully, turning his head slightly. Natasha had come home, sometime in the middle of the night, let herself into his apartment, and squished herself between his back and the back of the couch. She slept soundly, her red hair tossed over her face, her mouth open just a tad, her hands tucked against her chest. Clint waited for a few minutes, expecting her to wake as soon as her subconscious registered that he was awake, but she slept on. Warmth and curiosity filled Clint’s lungs as he lay there quietly. Natasha staying asleep next to him while he was awake was a form of trust she’d never admit to but meant a lot.

He shifted on the couch, trying to turn over without getting up, and when he finally managed it, her breathing was shallower, and she peeked at him through half-open eyelids. He studied the lines of her face, the exhaustion in the slightly purple swoops beneath her eyes, the cut on her lip he hadn’t noticed until he was nose to nose with her, the way he could still see blood crusted in her scalp and smell sweat and gunpowder and something acidic on her skin. She had come home then and come straight to his apartment, slipping into the space he left not intentionally for her but it seemed made for her anyway. She hadn’t even paused to shower. Clint’s throat tightened and his perception grew from her face to all of the places they pressed against each other, their thighs, her hip pressed into his abs, his nose to her nose. They had been on enough missions that falling asleep together in the field wasn’t uncommon, and sleeping was all it was. Body heat and safety overruled any lines which more resembled shoe-scuffed chalk lines.

“Go back to sleep,” he whispered.

Her eyes fluttered closed. “How much time?”

He lifted his wrist to check his watch. “An hour or so before we have to get ready.”

She let loose a soft, warm breath and sagged downward onto the couch, her head nestling onto his arm. He couldn’t resist brushing his fingers through a few of her red curls. She murmured, her eyes closing, “Wake me with enough time to shower.”

He promised her, and carefully slipped his other arm around her body, holding himself onto the couch. She didn’t stiffen, didn’t push him away. Her body stayed warm, and soft and pliable against his. He rested his head down on his arm too, his mouth against her temple, and drifted back asleep. He woke promptly an hour later and slipped a cold foot up Natasha’s leg where her jeans had crept upward on her calf. She cracked open an eye to glare at him and he grinned at her.

“Rise and shine, sunshine,” he said. “It’s noon. We should go over by one.”

“We slept in,” she muttered, seemingly not noticing when Clint froze at the word _we_ in that sentence. He liked it a little too much. He got off the couch, rubbing his hands through his hair. “I’ll come back in an hour then?”

There was a question in her voice and Clint looked at her over his shoulder. “Just go bring anything you need back here and shower.”

“Miss me?” She teased, but her eyes were warm.

“I want a t-shirt that says “My partner went to Timbucktu and all I got was this lousy shirt.””

“Christmas is coming and that sounds affordable. I heard the internet can make things like that.”

He stuck his head out of the kitchen. She was smirking at him from the couch still, looking beautifully rumpled and sleeping, her cheek red where she had been pressed against his arm. “Go get your stuff.”

            “Stuff,” he heard her mumble. “What a typical male.”

            Soon, they were both showered—separately—and dressed. Clint was eating a pop tart while Natasha tied his tie and complained about how he was eating before they went to the biggest American meal of the year. She leaned forward in his bathroom toward the mirror, applying her lipstick, mascara, sliding earrings into her ears, and doing her hair. He stood in the doorway, not even pretending not to watch her as she pinned a hairband securely into her red hair, and swept up the hair from underneath, tucking it back in so her neck was exposed.

            He reached out and flicked one of her thin gold chain earrings with the double triangles at the bottom. “I like these.”

            “Because they look like arrows,” she said, smiling a bit. “Okay. Let’s go.”

            They walked quietly out of the base to the parking lot where they made for Natasha’s car and she tossed him the keys. He raised his eyebrows at her, switching sides to take the driver’s seat. She shut the door behind her and gave no explanation, so he asked for none. She slept while he drove the whole whopping nine miles to Coulson’s house, a distance they had once joked about running, but then Coulson wanted them to look nice and nice to Natasha was heels and Clint hated running with her because she did run faster than him, though he could run for longer distances over a longer period of time and then they only ended up arguing about it.

            There had been an inch or two of snow on the ground from the weekend storm that blew through, and now it snowed, not heavily, just enough to blanket the suburbs with a delicate fresh covering that hung on tree branches and made the road just slick enough that Natasha’s frighteningly light two door coupe slid a bit in the corners and made Clint’s heart beat faster.

            He turned off the car and she sat upright and rubbed her eyes with fingers careful and experienced at not messing up her makeup. “It’s snowing.”

            “And let’s all note how I did not wreck your car,” he said, getting out of the car and pulling open her door. She stepped out, her shoulder brushing against his chest. She stopped, frowning, and he tensed. “What?”

            “What are they _doing_?” she asked, pointing.

            In Coulson’s side yard, there was a very furious, snowball filled game of touch football happening between most of the misfits. Clint could see Coulson in the kitchen window checking in on them like a worried mother hen, Hill peering over his shoulder looking very worried, more for their careers than their bones, Clint was sure.

            “Hawkeye!” bellowed Donovan. “Go long!”

            Clint grinned, breaking away from Natasha and jogging toward the game. He watched the ball arc out of Donovan’s hands, and he caught it easily, tucking it under his arm and dodging a very fast Hanna Cross on his way through the yard. He had no idea what way he was supposed to run or who he was playing for, but it didn’t matter. He shouldered Burns before Sitwell took him down and Clint felt the air burst out of his chest with a bark of laughter.

            Sitwell sat up, snow covering his hat, and grinned. “Fucker.”

            Clint sat up and tossed him the ball. “Coulson’s going to kill us.”

            “Dead,” said Hanna, giving Clint a hand up. “But not as dead as you’re going to be. Romanov looks like murder.”

            Her murder face and her I’m frightened and confused face were absolutely different but most people didn’t know that. He brushed the snow off his jacket and pants, stomping toward her, grinning. “Come play.”

            “I’m in a dress and heels, Barton,” she said, lifting her chin imperiously. Her eyes were bright and she scanned him with a critical eye. “You went down hard.”

            “Football,” he said, by way of explanation and she rolled her eyes at him. “Play.”

            She crossed her arms. “No. But I’m staying out here to make sure you don’t do something stupid like break yourself.”

            “I’m not going to break myself. It’s snow.” He jumped up and down, grinning in the cold despite himself. She was home and he was here and all was right with the world for one fucking day a year and he wanted to enjoy it. “It’s soft landing.”

            Natasha’s mouth pressed into a disapproving line. “The ground’s frozen. That’s why there’s snow. Frozen ground is hard.”

            He reached out and tugged at her crossed wrists. “Play. I promise we won’t tackle you.”

            She shook her head. “I’m going to help Hill and Coulson.”

            Clint quirked an eyebrow. “You’re cooking?”

            “God no,” Natasha let out with a breathy laugh. “They need help drinking wine.”

            “I’ll be in when I’m done kicking these guys’ asses,” Clint promised her, dropping her hands and backing away. She shook her head and he grinned at her before turning back to find out what team he was in.

            Hanna bumped her shoulder against his when he came to the huddle. “She mad?”

            Clint shook his head. “Nope. Let’s play.”

            It’d be easier if they weren’t asking him a lot of questions about her. Today felt different to Clint somehow.

            After his team won, Clint and the rest of them stomped into the house, shaking out snow from their hair and stomping their snow-covered boots on the towels someone had put by the door. Clint hung up his jacket and rubbed his hands together, wandering into the kitchen. Natasha was leaning against the counter, listening to Maria recount her latest attempt at online dating. Clint walked up behind Natasha as stealthily as he could, Maria deliberately not looking at him, and clapped his very cold hands to her cheeks.

            He felt the decision in her body where all of her training and all of her instincts told her to throw him into the ground and pull a knife out of that plum-and-gold colored dress to put against his jugular, and he felt when Natasha—his Natasha, the one very few other people got—kicked in and shut down her training, knowing his hands against her skin. She relaxed back into him and pulled his hands off her face.

            “Cold?” he teased, picking up her wine glass and taking a sip. He didn’t know why he felt so deliberately playful tonight. They usually saved this for movie nights at his apartment or for the adrenaline rush after a mission. He could feel everyone’s eyes on them and moving around them to exchange looks. Natasha either noticed and didn’t care, or didn’t notice at all. Either way was fine by Clint.

She took the wine glass back from him. “Very cold. The wine’s too dry for you. There’s a white you might like.”

“Who’s driving?” He asked, going over to the counter to inspect the wine bottles. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Natasha glare at Maria for whatever face Hill was making at her over his shoulder. He realized he’d rather not know. She decided that he’d drive home so he picked a beer out of the fridge instead and his team went to the living room to turn on the game and celebrate.

“You hear about Stark?” Coulson asked quietly to Clint as Clint sat down next to him on the couch. Natasha and Hill seemed to have the kitchen under control. “Disappeared in Afghanistan.”

Clint’s eyes barely left the TV. It was second and down. “Stark of Stark Industries?”

“Yeah.”

Clint snorted. “Great. Like we need any more weapons in that part of the world. Natasha and I are going to be disassembling his weapons systems in terrorist hands in a few months.”

“You know most of them by heart. It’s easier to send you,” Coulson said after a pause, sounding a little frustrated and hurt.

Clint tore his eyes from the screen to stare at his friend and handler. “I wasn’t complaining about going there. I was complaining about weapons companies out to make a buck.”

Coulson nodded, his eyes on the game. “Right.”

At dinner, they went around the table and shared their gratitudes. As always, Clint said as loudly as he could manage which wasn’t loudly at all when it came to admitting this, that he was grateful for a family. Under the table, Natasha’s hand curled over his knee and he pressed his hand down on top of hers. Natasha said she was grateful for time and patience, which earned more than one carefully cleared throat around the table, something that both Clint and Natasha ignored pointedly.

Afterward, the parade was on TV and they were all sated, quiet, and sprawled around Coulson’s living room. Clint watched Natasha cross over the room and slide onto the couch next to him, Hanna scooting to make room for her. To his surprise, Natasha all but crawled onto his lap, tucking herself into a space next to him not big enough for a human and leaning her head against his shoulder. The entire room went quiet, staring at them. Natasha’s breathing and slightly flushed cheeks told Clint she was well aware of what she was doing, but she seemed determined to ignore them.

If she was ignoring them, then so would he. He put an arm around her, twining a curl that had come loose around his finger languidly. She was warm and small and absolutely his in all the ways that mattered much more than sex and promises about forever. He wouldn’t give this up, he realized, for anything.

She fell asleep next to him like that, the third time she had fallen asleep that day, and Clint knew he had to get her home where she could rest from that mission before they went out the next week to Indonesia. He shook her awake and she sat up instantly, wide-eyed and scanning the room. He kept his palm against her cheek until she realized there was no threat and they said their goodbyes in the front hallway where they shrugged their jackets on and headed out into the snow. Natasha fiddled with her earrings the entire drive home, and Clint drove extra careful, trying not to think about what happened when they got back to base.

At his door, he opened it and stood there, studying her for anything. She chewed her lip.

“Happy Thanksgiving,” she said finally.

“Happy birthday,” he said in return, and flicked on the light. He left her at the door while he fished her present out of the bedside table and pressed it into her hands. “You’ll like this one.”

“The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe,” she read after unwrapping it. She smiled up at him, a small and true smile that made Clint’s heart do somersaults in his chest like he was some love-struck teenager. “Thank you.”

She didn’t move, and he didn’t know how to ask her for what he thought they both wanted without blazing ahead. He cleared his throat. “Stay?”

She blinked at him, looking like she wanted to say yes, and looking very vulnerable all in the same breath, and then her body tensed. He stepped closer to her. “Not like that, Natasha. Just stay. You sleep better with me.”

It was a guess, and it was right because she didn’t correct him. She just nodded, stepped inside, and shut the door behind her. 


	7. 2005

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thanksgiving, 2005

Clint liked the way Natasha killed. He had long ago gotten over his qualms about being someone who was, in his nature, someone attracted to the darker side of life. Once, he had been ashamed. SHIELD had made him less ashamed. Natasha hadn’t quite made him proud of his morbid curiosity. Pride wasn’t quite the right word. He was awed by her, intrigued by the way she pulled it off, fascinated by the way people died. She had made him comfortable with the act of watching people die, and with the act of watching someone he loved kill someone else.

He hadn’t told her he loved her. He wasn’t an idiot. He wanted to watch her kill people, not be killed himself.

The mark in Tirana was part of a long chain they had been working on for awhile, the people who were sending viruses into Chinese and Iranian nuclear reactor sites not for the purposes of shutting them down, but to steal information for groups destined to kill many people without due cause. Not that there was any due cause in using a nuclear weapon. Clint still wished there was an international treaty to ban them. He wasn’t against war. He thought war was an often necessary element of international affairs, and he wasn’t, as previously pointed out, against people dying. But nuclear weapons were the opposite of what Clint did. What he and Natasha did was technical, focused, masterful, artful. They killed without collateral damage.

The entire purpose of a nuclear weapon was collateral damage.

So after Natasha interrogated each of the subjects, she killed them. They couldn’t risk the higher ups being informed of her exact identity—by the time her victims died, they all knew exactly who was torturing them—and because there was a thrill in knowing every victim knew more about what she would do to them than the person before them had. They knew someone was onto them. The higher on the chain, the more they knew. And the more they knew to be paranoid and fearful. Paranoid and fearful were Natasha’s favorite. She played with them.

Clint had once seen a video clip of orcas teaching younger orcas to hunt. They separated a seal, put it on an iceberg, and practiced making waves that pushed the seal off the iceberg and toward a waiting orca’s mouth. They didn’t eat the seal at first. They kept catching the seal, putting it back on the iceberg, and practicing until the younger whales got the move just right. They played with that seal for hours.

Natasha in the field was an orca. She was not his Natasha Romanov, the woman who wore yoga pants, his old t-shirts, and let her hair do whatever it damn well pleased on her days off. She was not his Natasha Romanov who thought cookies n’ cream icecream solved most of her problems, who slept with one hand under her pillow flat against a knife, who watched L&O SVU when she was sick, and West Wing when she wanted to feel sentimental. In the field, she was the Black Widow, a woman who brushed men’s faces with her tits before she slit their throats. She waited for that exhale that came with the move, because their body was most aroused, the blood pressure rising, and the release of blood from their jugulars sprayed everywhere. She didn’t mind the clean up if the kill was fun.

When he first saw her kill, years and years ago it felt like now, it had startled him. It had made him afraid and he had feared her before he even met her eye to eye. The words that came to mind had been along the lines of psychopath and serial killer, not ruthless and shameless. When he saw her kill for their side, watched the way she slipped into another face and watched the way her eyes lit up, he had wondered if she was stable, if there were facets to her which he would find unbearable.

He had asked her once if she liked killing people.

She had thought it over and then looked at him dead in the eye, her pupils nothing but distant shores in her blue eyes. “I like killing people who deserve to die.”

He hadn’t ever thought of it that way.

It wasn’t that Clint liked death and he didn’t seek it out. It’s that watching Natasha work was beautiful, and the people they had been sent to kill usually did deserve to die. He much rather watched her slit people’s throats than seduce and play a long act of being someone’s playtoy. He hated when he had to cover her for that, and she knew that he hated it. He had become somewhat less discrete with his feelings about her playing Aliya the Slovenia socialite, a reoccurring role for her.

“Tell me again,” she said, tapping the mark’s cheek with the flat side of her knife. “Tell me again about how you brought the virus to the train station.”

“There was a man,” babbled the mark, his eyes wide and fearful, but he couldn’t stop watching Natasha. He was tied to a column. He was missing most of his fingers but she had staunched the bleeding, let him believe she’d save him if he only gave her all the information. “I got a call on my phone that said I should be waiting at the 4B platform for the train to Budapest.”

Clint watched through the scope of his gun. He had no intention on taking the shot. He was there in case she needed him to take down someone else.

“We’d sit next to each other on the bench and when he got up, he’d take my briefcase and I’d take his. I figured that wasn’t too hard so I packed the briefcase with foam and tucked the flash drive between it.”

“You aren’t saying there was only one copy of the virus, are you? Come now, then, Victor. You and I know that the risk was too great.” Natasha brushed her lips against his ears as she whispered to him. The sweat on the mark’s forehead doubled. “Tell me where the other copy is.”

“My hard drive,” he whispered. “Not the computer on the desk. The one in my drawer. The key’s on my keyring. God, I just kept it because it’s such a beautiful piece of code, you know.”

“I’m sure,” Natasha purred. Clint grinned. She found the hard drive he was talking about on a small netbook she set on top of the desk. “Where else, Victor?”

“Nowhere,” he said.

She turned around and reached out, digging the point of her knife into his cheek. “Where else, Victor? I won’t ask again.”

“The cloud,” he gasped and Clint could see him whimpering though the mike wasn’t picking it up. “It’s on the cloud. We made an internal cloud network.”

“File name?” asked Natasha brusquely. “And network password.”

The mark tried to push back. “I thought you knew how to break in.”

“You’re wasting my time,” she said simply, and cut off his ear lobe. A quarter inch piece of flesh and she had him screaming and writhing. “Tell me.”

He told her. When she verified she could access all of the material he promised her, she drew the knife across his throat. He barely managed to look surprised before he bled out there, bound to the column in his office building for someone else to find.

Natasha held up the flash drive and tucked the computer under her arm. “Heading out.”

Clint checked her exits. “You’re good to go. See you at the hotel.”

He waited until she was in her car, safely on the road, before packing in his equipment and getting out of his own vantage point across the street, back down to a normal level in street clothes, a guitar case slung over his shoulder, whistling a tune as he made his way through the Tirana streets to their hotel. She beat him there, naturally, as she drove and he walked. He locked the door behind him. She sat by the window, pulling pins from her hair. It was dyed dark for this mission—she didn’t want to be too recognizable to one of the three coders who wrote this particular virus and who was aware that an assassin took out at least one of his partners thus far.

He dropped the guitar case and poured himself a glass of sparkling water. “I miss the red.”

She gave him a faint smile. “You keep saying that.”

He sank onto the hotel’s sofa and downed the water, laying back to stare at her. He liked being in the middle of nowhere with her, working on their own, reporting in when they needed to, making their own time frame. It felt like independence and the way he always thought partnerships would go. They were some strange creation that no one else understood. From the outside, Clint could see that if he had friends in a relationship like his, he’d question it to them too. But inside of this strange place with Natasha, he didn’t mind at all. They shared a bed. They touched faces, arms, necks, legs. They understood each other as others had never understood them.

Natasha needed an hour or two to come down after being the Black Widow for so long, and Clint needed to stretch out and take a nap, resting his eyes and mind from almost eight hours of crouching with his eyes pressed against a scope.  He closed his eyes and fell asleep, knowing Natasha was keeping watch. Sometime later, when the sun had set, he woke to the pressure of her easing her body onto the couch with him. She sighed, relaxing her body into the curvature of his body, leaving no space between them. He let his hand drop to her hair. It didn’t look the same but it felt the same.

She mumbled something into his chest and he hummed a question in response. She propped her chin up on his chest. “I said it’s Thanksgiving in the States today.”

“I knew that,” he said, not opening his eyes. “I’m grateful that I am not cooking.”

“I’m grateful I’m not eating what you cooked,” she countered, and he snorted when she pressed an open mouthed smile, lips and teeth, into his neck. He ran a hand down her back lazily. She drew a circle on his chest through his shirt with a deliberate forefinger.

“There’s a book for you,” he said sleepily. “In my bag at the bottom.”

She sat up and he opened his eyes. She said, “When’d you go to a bookstore?”

He shrugged. “Sofia a couple of weeks ago.”

“You,” she said, and then climbed off of him. He missed her body and the way she had huffed out just that directive at him. He heard her in the bedroom digging through clothes.

She wandered back out into the living room and he watched her hips sway in the yoga pants, the way her mismatched socks brightened their dull room, and her fingers unwrapping the book she had found. She sat on his legs, just below the knees, cross-legged, and stared at the cover. He closed his eyes, but couldn’t help trying to peek at her expression again. In the dim light, it was hard to tell what she thought.

“Thank you,” she said quietly.

“The first time I bought you a book,” he said, and yawned, “Coulson told me I shouldn’t ever get you anything that reminded you of your past. But I saw that and just thought it was too beautiful to pass up.”

She opened the book of Russian fairytales written in Russian, running her fingers over the delicate pages of Cryllic font. “I love it.”

“Good,” he murmured, closing his eyes again. “Happy birthday.”

“Thank you, Clint,” she whispered, leaning down and pressing a chaste kiss to his cheek. He smiled and said nothing because he didn’t need to say anything more. He loved the dichotomy of her, the push and the pull. A few hours ago, a ruthless killer who made him understand that he was not a broken person for being awed and curious about death. Now, a book loving woman sitting on his legs, tearing up over a book of fairytales. She was a prism, and sometimes, if Clint felt particularly brave, he could admit that it wasn’t selfish to call himself her light. They saw each other’s angles differently every time they turned.

“Have you ever heard a Russian fairytale?” asked Natasha, flipping halfway through the book. Clint shook his head. “Do you want me to read to you?”

He hadn’t known that he wanted that until she asked him. His eyes flew open and he stared at her, mute. She smiled at him, shy and understanding, and turned to a fairytale she seemed to recognize. She sat there, cat-like, reading to him in Russian, until they both fell asleep.


	8. 2006

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thanksgiving, 2006

_Here, for whatever reason, is the world. And here it stays. With me on it,_ Clint quoted to himself. For once, he was vaguely aware of the way the world turned and the incredibly smallness of his body and his self in the grand scheme of things. The vague awareness came only as he fell, fell, fell, and the world spun black. _Don’t panic._

\----

Clint coughed, arching his back as he gasped, drawing in air his brain told him was dusty and toxic. It tasted pure, clinical, sterilized against his tongue which stuck to the roof of his dry mouth. His hearing buzzed in slowly, distant sounds roaring toward him like approaching trains until he heard doors, the mechanical automatic kind, the tonal beep of machines, and the higher pitched and less consistent beeps of people sliding IDs across scanners, moving from room to room.

 _Hospital,_ he realized. _I’m in a hospital._ And not just any. SHIELD. He curled his toes, delighted that both of his legs worked. Bonus. His body felt like a building had fallen on him, but his legs worked. No major spinal damage. He curled both of his fists, feeling the pinch of an IV on his left hand. Pain radiated through his body, but it was the dull, persistent, whole body pain. Like he had after he jumped out of planes or off high rise buildings or was out in the field sleeping on concrete too long. He took another breath and it stung less than the first one he recalled.

A cool, dry hand closed over his right hand. “Barton.”

He opened his eyes, the room spinning in colors: white, gray, red, and closed them again. He squeezed the hand back. “Natasha.”

He could feel the relief radiating through their one point of contact. “Welcome back to the land of the living.”

“Feels like a building fell on me,” he muttered, licking his lips.

She released his hand and he almost complained until he felt the brush of chapstick against his mouth, her wrist gliding over the scruff on his chin. She said in return, “A building did fall on you. On us.”

He tried to open his eyes again. “You okay?”

“A little bruised up,” she said, which was Natasha-speak for pretty fucking banged up. He smiled a bit and he felt her fingers on his cheek. “Remember what happened?”

He was beginning to piece it together in his head. “Yeah. Suicide bomber. Riyadh. Never a dull moment. Wanna tell me how I ended up stateside?”

“We got to a local safe hospital,” she explained, her voice too controlled and neutral to be unpracticed. “Everything seemed fine and on our flight back, you had a pulmonary embolism.”

He tried to open his eyes again. She was slightly more in focus this time. “Explains why everything hurts.”

She bit her lower lip and took a rattling breath. “They say you’ll be fine.”

“You don’t believe them,” he interpreted.

She looked away. “It scared me.”

He thought that she wasn’t just talking about the pulmonary embolism or the suicide bomber. He pulled her hand down from his face. It wasn’t the time to talk about that though, the look of vulnerability playing naked on her face enough that he, who couldn’t make out her eyelashes, could feel it in the way her body hummed next to his. He said lightly, “Clearly, I’m fine. But I could use something to drink.”

Giving her a task seemed to help and his brain slowly understood how battered she was. She limped, she wore long sleeves inside which she only did when she had wicked bruises to cover, and she wasn’t turning her head to the left at all. With her help and the help of two nurses, Clint was soon sitting up in bed, carefully drinking orange juice and eyeing the pudding cup in front of him.

“How much shit will you give me,” he said, lifting his eyebrows, “if I need your help?”

She raised an eyebrow in return. “Your arms weren’t broken. They work just fine.”

He scowled but knew she was right. The more he learned the limits of his body in pain right now, the easier his recovery would be. He carefully lifted the spoon to his mouth. The pudding tasted like ass and ash. She asked him how he knew how either of those things tasted, and he cracked a grin, wincing as the slightly tremor of laughter upset his entire aching body.

“You’re right, he does look good for a guy who’s been out for a few days,” Coulson said, arriving in the doorway. Clint frowned at him. Coulson wasn’t wearing his normal suit. Instead, he was wearing jeans and a sweater, carrying an apron, and looking positively delighted by some joke that had Natasha smiling in her small slight way. “Happy Thanksgiving, Clint. Thanks for joining us.”

Clint groaned. “Shit. I’m sorry. You should be at home for the misfits, not here.”

“I want to be here,” Coulson said, his pale blue eyes still sparkling in a way that had Clint nervous. He walked into the room. “It’s my one holiday off every year and you decided to throw me out of my routine.”

It hadn’t been intentional but Clint didn’t know how to say that. He hated being imposing on others. He shifted his gaze to Natasha, hoping she’d step in to help him out. But she was looking over Coulson’s shoulder, her eyes bright and hopeful. Clint ran his eyes along the same path her gaze traveled, and watched, open-mouthed, as Donovan, Hanna, Hill, Chloe, Sitwell, and a few of the other misfits stomped into Clint’s room, all carrying dishes of food, paper plates, and cups.

Hill reached into her jacket (all of them instinctively tensed) and pulled out a bottle of Natasha’s favorite red wine, pressing it into her hand with a smile and the low words that Clint barely caught, “It’s not like you’re driving tonight. Drink up. He made it.”

Natasha smiled back at Hill, and sat down on the chair next to Clint’s bed, taking out a pocket knife to uncork the wine. He stared in awe as his friends—his family, _his_ family, his _family_ —set up Thanskgiving dinner in his hospital room. He turned his head to look at Natasha who moved only her eyes to him, a silent question in his gaze.

“They were having it down the hall,” she explained, working the cork loose and handing the bottle back to Hill, “So that we could all be here with you. Easy enough to pick up and bring everyone here.”

Clint sank backward onto his bed. “Why?”

Natasha closed her hand around his, squeezing it briefly, and said, “Doctor says you can have anything without the sauce. Bland food. Turkey, mashed potatoes, green beans?”

He tried to nod but it hurt too much. “Yeah.”

She cut up his meat for him and he managed to use a fork in a largely respectable manner, watching mostly in silence as the group laughed, sat on the floor, the window sill, the edge of his bed, joking with each other, reminiscing with each other, bumping around each other with an ease and comfort that they never showed outside of this group, or even outside of this day. Donovan had made a name for himself the first day by challenging Natasha to a sparring match, remarking on the thinness of the Black Widow when she first came to SHIELD and how she wasn’t nearly as strong or frightening as he had heard. She had beaten his ass into a pulp by barely breaking a sweat. Hill was seeing as a ladder climber, someone who went through field agent training just to brush up her resume, when she was a politician at heart. None of them got to see the way she handled everyone’s rough edges with ease and competence on Thanksgiving, how she befriended Natasha and Clint of all people, and how she kicked off her shoes, tucking her bare feet underneath herself at the edge of Clint’s bed, recounting her own suicide bomber survival story.

He didn’t want this, he realized. This was too much. He didn’t deserve the feeling swallowing up this room. He could drown in the love being pressed out from each of these people, unlovable and bitter and discontent with the world, the misfits. He felt saturated in a feeling that was foreign and bitter, that made him nauseous. Guys like him didn’t get stories like this. They didn’t find themselves and a purpose. They were outsiders. They died too young of diseases of the forever maligned and marginalized. They died of suicide, of drugs, of alcohol. They died because they were fractured by life and too unlovable to be loved. Love filled in those cracks in his ribs where he felt like he might break apart.

He opened his eyes. “Tash.”

The room stilled for a moment, eyes turning toward him with curiosity and worry shining bright in the fluorescent hospital lighting, and then Natasha sat back down in the chair next to him, and the conversation resumed its dull roar. “Need something?”

His mouth felt dry. “Happy birthday.”

She ran her hands through his hair. “Thank you.”

He closed his eyes. “There’s a book for you. Coulson,” and Phil appeared, “my room, the bedside table on my—I mean—the left side—there’s a book wrapped in blue paper.”

“I’ll get it,” Coulson said easily and Clint opened his eyes to watch Coulson hand off his plate to Hill to guard before he left the room.

“You could have waited,” Natasha pointed out, her fingers still against his scalp. He turned his head slightly, his nose and mouth brushing against her arm. She smelled like lavender and hibiscious. Her fingers moved slowly. “I can wait.”

“Don’t want to break tradition,” he said, not willing to turn away and admit he was taking comfort from her contact.

Coulson brought the book back and handed it to Natasha for Clint. Clint watched her face as she unwrapped it in front of everyone. She stared at the cover and then burst into laughter, the sound so unusual to the others that they stopped their conversations dead and stared at her, open mouthed in shock. Clint’s mouth twitched in a smile as she doubled over and she pressed her mouth against his cheek.

“Thank you,” she said, tucking the copy of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy under her arm. “Now I’ll get all of the references.”

Coulson said, “I demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty.”

He and Clint high-fived very gently.

Hill handed Natasha back her glass of wine. “Care to explain?”

“Clint,” Natasha said, her eyes on the book, unaware of the raised eyebrows she got by calling him by his first name and not his last, “likes to quote this book at the most inopportune times.”

“I might have encouraged it,” admitted Coulson sheepishly.

“She says inopportune but they’re absolutely perfectly timed quotes,” Clint argued. “Like we were getting shot at as we were driving away…”

“And he’s shouting, “I don’t want to die now! I still have a headache! I don’t want to go to heaven with a headache! I’ll be all cross!’,” Natasha lamented, but there was a ghost of a smile around the edges of her eyes. “Which made no sense and distracted me.”

“One time in Latvia, I had to give her a quarter every time I said ‘Don’t Panic,’ Clint told Coulson, making a face.

Coulson cracked a smile. “That’s my line.”

“Except when we’re in deep and you’re not there. I figured I’d fill in.”

Coulson looked at Natasha, “How much did he pay you?”

Her look was terribly smug. “Sixteen dollars.”

Hill said, “This year I am thankful I’m not in the field with either of you.”

“Amen,” said a few others, and they laughed.

The attention drew away from Clint and Natasha eventually and Natasha edged her butt onto Clint’s bed against his hip. She rested the book on his chest. “Your turn to read.”

He touched the cover. “Yeah?”

She nodded. “Besides, it’ll be your voice in my head the whole time when I’m reading.”

“Alright,” he agreed, warmth filling the places in his body where pain had resided. “After they leave.”

He maybe didn’t deserve this kindness from the people around him, but he wanted and needed it just the same. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Only after I wrote this did it make so much sense that Clint would like this book and Natasha find it deeply grating. I'm grateful she is willing to listen to him read it to her. <3


	9. 2007

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thanksgiving, 2007

Car keys dropped into his lap and Clint recognized them, vaguely, as Natasha’s car keys but his eyes were trained on the football game playing out on the television. Natasha flicked his ear and he scowled, swatting her hand away.

            “We have a butter emergency,” she said.

            He turned his head, but didn’t take his eyes off the screen. “A butter emergency.”

            “Yes,” she said, and flicked his ear again. This time he tore his eyes from the game and looked up at her. She could take his breath away, even with her hair slipping free of its ponytail, even with flour on her cheek, even wearing Coulson’s ridiculous The Spice Must Flow cooking apron. He wondered if there was ever going to be a time when he didn’t look at her and think that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever known. Three years of sleeping together—not sex, sleeping together, but it was not ‘just’ sleeping together—and he was still amazed when he woke up to a sleeping Natasha nestled into his side. It would, he thought, never get old.

            Her eyes were dancing when she touched his lips and he focused again on her face, passing her a crooked and unapologetic smile. She said, “You were staring.”

            “Blame me?” he asked, standing up, and stuffing the keys in his back pocket. “Butter.”

            “Butter,” she agreed.

            He invaded her space a little as he slid past her, letting his hip brush against hers, her hand trailing across his chest, his hand touching the curvature of her waist. He felt the intake of breath, watched out of the corner of his eye the way her lips parted. She caught him by a belt loop, holding him back a half step. He turned his head slightly, his eyes running over her face. They were teasing each other with personal space quite a bit the last few days and he didn’t understand it but the shift of their status quo, of quiet affectionate space and body heat shared out of a common emotion neither of them dared name, unnerved him. And made him feel alive.

            She said nothing, her eyes lingering, he thought, but maybe he was mistaken, on his mouth for a second, and then her fingers opened and he was released. He hesitated, just a moment, and then pulled the keys free, twirling them around his finger anxiously as he bolted out the front door for the safety and relief of the car, the empty roads, the bored clerks waiting for the grocery stores to close. Some days were harder than others to be around her without crossing the lines they so deliberately drew in the sand. When either of them was feeling vulnerable, they could feel the golden thread between them humming. He liked being open around her, being able to be angry and afraid without fear of judgment or loss of respect, but sometimes, he knew, being on guard was necessary.

            He’d do about anything to keep her in his life. Losing her was no longer an option.

            He returned home with two boxes of butter. He dumped them on the counter next to her. “Enough butter?”

            She glanced sideways from where she was measuring out the other ingredients with Maria. “Enough for a heart attack.”

            His eyes skipped to her pulse in her neck. She was wearing a thin gold necklace and he tipped his head, peering at it closely. A gold arrow sat at the base of her throat. He hadn’t noticed it earlier when they were getting reading at the apartment. Without thinking, he lifted a cold finger and touched it. She stilled instantly, her eyes wide.

            “I got it in Belgrade,” she said, her voice low.

            Belgrade was four years ago.

            He blinked, and withdrew his hand. “I like it.”

            Maria reached over Natasha. “If you’re not cutting up the butter, I will.”

            And like that, Natasha’s attention was dragged from Clint back to the job at hand. He got another beer out of the fridge and took a seat on a bar stool, pulling up a leg and watching them. “You all need help?”

            Hill sniffed and barely looked up when she said, “You made a pie your first year here and I remember it still. It tasted like ass.”

            “That’s not fair,” protested Clint, shaking his head. “It’s Juneberry. It’s an acquired taste.”

            “Like most things you like,” muttered Hill, pointedly glancing sideways at Natasha who didn’t seem to notice. She tapped the recipe book in front of Clint’s partner. “Food processor time.”

            Natasha had too much fun with a food processor. Every time Clint tried to ask her a question, she hit the button to turn it on. He made a face at her and she laughed, a soft, reluctant sound that rang like music through him. He made a face again, just to hear her laugh again. Finally Hill unplugged it and made Natasha roll out the dough on the table. Clint watched Natasha rock up on her toes, using all of her muscle to roll out the dough. Her arm muscles tensed and relaxed. There was flour in her hair, and she had butter on her nose. She looked utterly at peace.

            Then she gestured with her chin to the food processor. “Think they’ll let us bring it in the field?”

            “No,” said Clint and Hill at the same time in the same flat tone. Clint said, “I don’t even know what you want to put in a food processor, Nat, but don’t turn me off your pie.”

            She opened her mouth, a catty remark right on the tip of her tongue, he could almost see it, and then she flushed, and closed her mouth. Clint paused, his beer against his lips, and raised his eyebrows. Very few things could stop Natasha in the middle of a sentence and he couldn’t think of a single one that didn’t include a life at immediate risk. He finally tipped the beer bottle back and took a drink. When he set it down, he turned the bottle in a slow circle, staring at it.

            When he looked up, finally, lost in his own thoughts, Natasha was staring at him. She quickly looked away, pressing her fingers into the pie crust as she let it settle into the glass dish. He couldn’t help but wonder what it’d look like to have her thumbs pressing into his body the way they pressed into the soft dough. She brushed off her hands, flour bursting everywhere, and Clint grinned while Hill scowled at her.

            He and Donovan set the table. Out of the corner of his eye, Clint saw Natasha sit Chloe down in a chair so she could fix her French braid. Natasha’s hands worked deftly and her eyes were focused while Chloe chatted about something mundane, her hands flying through the air. Then Chloe stood, spun, and hugged Natasha, an act that made the entire kitchen stand still and stare. Clint froze in the doorway from the living room, waiting for Natasha to light up in fear or shut down completely. He could see Coulson carefully set down his oven mitts, ready to move.

            Natasha’s arms went around Chloe and she hugged her back, her eyes closed. She said audibly, “He was a shithead anyway, Chlo. I’m glad you made it here.”

            There was no way Natasha wasn’t hyperaware of all the eyes on her, but something in what just happened was too much for Clint. He averted his eyes, and then carefully made his way out of the house in the melee that started back up in the kitchen. He went into the garage, closing the door quietly behind him, reveling in the darkness. He leaned against Coulson’s car and stared at his hands.

            He wanted her almost every moment of every day and for so many years, he had tucked that knowledge into a corner of his mind. They called it compartamentalizing and he did it well. He did it with every troubling part of his life and sometimes, at least in that way, Natasha was one of those troubling parts of his life. He didn’t know what changed. Why tonight it seemed like they couldn’t stop staring at each other, why tonight he couldn’t see her touching anyone else without wanting to hold her himself. He didn’t know why and he didn’t _want_ to know why. Reasons were dangerous. Reasons were knowledge. Knowledge would free his wanting, his desire, from that small place in the back of his mind.

            The garage door opened and Clint flinched, then it shut and he heard quiet footsteps. Natasha only moved noisily when she wanted to move noisily, but he’d know her footsteps anywhere. He stared down at his feet, suddenly frustrated with her. He needed distance.

            “I just need a moment,” he said, aware of how gruff he sounded, how cold he sounded. _Maybe that’s what I need. To push her away just a little bit._

            She said nothing, just moved through the dark, her hand gliding on the side of the car until she reached him and she slipped up against him, wrapping her arms around his back, her mouth warm against his neck, her hair brushing his cheek. He closed his eyes, his heart wavering for a moment, and then slipped his arms around her body too, holding her to him as they leaned against the car. She felt strong and vibrant, alive, and warm, and present.

            She whispered against the skin behind his ear, “I’d never play you.”

            He turned his head just a little bit so his lips were against her hair. “I know.”

            “I’m not doing it deliberately,” she said.

            He sighed. “I know.”

            She moved so swiftly he almost lost track of her words—“Except this is deliberate”—in the middle of the motion before her mouth was pressed against his, asking questions he didn’t know the answers to, her tongue asking for permission he was too desperate to give.

“Natasha,” he whispered, turning his face away from her. They both stilled. He swallowed hard. “Be sure this is what you want.”

For a long, terrifying moment, he thought she might step away from him and put herself back together. He waited, his hands on her lower back, and then she kissed him again, her hands sliding up into his hair, fingers running along his scalp, and the tiny knowledge in the back of his mind was overtaking his mind like a wildfire. He groaned, digging his fingers into her back so she arched against him. His mouth parted, his teeth catching her lower lip and he felt the gasp that came from her hips jerking into his and her chest slamming into his. He grinned into her mouth.

            “Fuck,” whispered Natasha, lifting her chin to let him kiss and suck at her throat. “I knew it’d be like this. Why did I wait?”

            He flicked his tongue along the back of her ear and kissed her hard, turning her to press her back against the car. He pulled his mouth away from her to run his hands up her body, a thumb skipping beneath a breast and away just as quickly. Her body trembled against his, but in the dark, he could see enough to see her eyes were bright and focused. There was no disappearing here. She was no one but his Natasha.

            “Worth the wait,” he said, kissing her gently, then hard. He forgot any sort of decorum. He wanted to take her home right then. He didn’t need dinner. He didn’t need anything. He just needed her.

            They were busy enough making out against Coulson’s car that neither of them heard the garage door open, and the lights turn on. Clint yanked his mouth off of Natasha, resting his forehead against her shoulder, drawing in heavy breaths and feeling Natasha’s body vibrate in laughter as she rested her forehead on his shoulder. Clint peeked around her head at the stairs into the garage and saw Hill, Coulson, Donovan, Chloe, Hanna, and Sitwell staring into the garage, all but Coulson and Hill open-mouthed.

            “Don’t scratch the car,” Coulson said, and backed into the house, Hill shaking her head and following them.

            “You’re like teenagers,” muttered Hanna, but she was grinning when she grabbed Donovan and Chloe by their collars and dragged them back into the house. “Come on, Sitwell.”

            Sitwell managed to say, “About fucking time,” before he spun and yelled, “Hill, you owe me fifty bucks!”

            Natasha tensed and Clint sighed, leaning away and giving her the distance she’d inevitably needed. In the light now, he could see the flour on her shirt and her face, the flush that ran down her neck and into the V of her neckline, her hair completely free from its restraints and tangled around her shoulders. She studied him with the same unsure expression and then reached out, grabbing him by his wrist and pulling him back toward her. She kissed him, gently this time, without any of the fever that burned through them a few minutes ago.

            “Dinner. And then take me home, Clint.”

            He figured he could manage that. He threaded their fingers together and gripped her hand tightly. “Don’t let me forget to give you your birthday present when we get home.”

            “I intend on collecting,” she teased him.

            Clint rolled his eyes but grinned, lifting her hand to kiss her palm, never pulling his eyes from hers. “I meant a book. What on earth are you talking about?”

            It should be noted that when they got home, he absolutely did forget to give her her birthday present. He gave it to her the next day in bed, watching her unwrap it with lazy fingers, paper tossed everywhere. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. She read the cover, looked at him, and set the book to the side. They were the highly improbable and they were the black swans. It was a few more hours before either of them thought to do anything other that put the theory to practice. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That really was listed as one of the best books of 2007. I haven't read it yet, but when I saw it, I realized it was absolutely perfect for them :)


	10. 2008

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thanksgiving, 2008

            “Shit.”

            “I’m going to need something a little more specific than that, Barton.”

            “Shit’s about all I got.”

            “How bad does it look?”

            “Bad.”

            “Details.”

            “We should have rented WALL-E.”

            “This is why I told you to check the reviews instead of just staring at the covers.”

            “Apparently it doesn’t even have a mummy in it.”

            “It has mummy in the title.”

            “Look at you, judging a movie by its title.”

            “Says the man who picked a movie based on the cover.”

            “A movie about robot sounded stupid.”

            “But.”

            “But it’s getting the most incredible reviews online.”

            “I told you that you can’t go wrong with Pixar.”

            “I’m still recovering from Toy Story.”

            “Never seen it.”

            “You’re basically Buzz Lightyear. You should see it.”

            “That makes you the cowboy, doesn’t it?”

            “Woody. Yeah.”

            “Woody?”

            “…Yes.”

            “Yes, yes you are.”

            “Natasha.”

            “Yes?”

            “I’m reconsidering my life choices.”

            “In what regards?”

            “Introducing you to American pop culture.”

            “I have no regrets.”

            “Of course you don’t.”

            “I’m not watching a mummy movie without a mummy in it.”

            “You’re picky.”

            “And you’re lucky because of it.”

            “Touche.”

            “Then what are we going to do?”

            “It was your genius idea to go away for Thanksgiving this year.”

            “Coulson’s away, Hill’s in training, Sitwell’s away…I mean, we didn’t have a choice.”

            “We could be home, in bed, with more movie selections.”

            “You have a profound lack of respect for the American Midwest.”

            “It’s done nothing but rain since we arrived.”

            “I thought you were Russian.”

            “If it was snowing, I wouldn’t complain.”

            “You admit it then.”

            “Admit what.”

            “That you’re complaining.”

            “That we’re one hundred and twenty miles from a town in the pouring rain with a very bad movie? Yes.”

            “You’re cranky.”

            “My head still hurts.”

            “I told you to get farther away before you hit the button.”

            “Blasts don’t usually bother me.”

            “Are you usually thirty feet away?”

            “No.”

            “I rest my case.”

            “You haven’t made a case.”

            “Cranky Natasha is not my favorite.”

            “You have a favorite version of me?”

            “Yes.”

            “Elaborate.”

            “My favorite Natasha is a naked Natasha on top of me.”

            “Predictable.”

            “Hey. You.”

            “What?”

            “I lied. My favorite Natasha is the one where you’re wearing the same clothes you wore yesterday and you’re curled up on a couch and you’re not wearing any makeup and your hair’s all knotted. And you have a book.”

            “Tell me why that’s your favorite me?”

            “Come here. It’s my favorite you because it’s the most real you. The one that you invented by yourself without anyone’s help.”

            “You’re lucky.”

            “Pretty good save, eh?”

            “Incredibly good.”

            “Happy birthday, Natasha.”

            “Happy Thanksgiving, Clint.”

            “I have a book for you.”

            “I know.”

            “But I forgot it.”

            “I know. I saw it on the kitchen table. It’s in my bag.”

            “It’s your brain that I love.”

            “Which is why you have your face planted in my breasts right now?”

            “Exactly.”

            “Clint.”

            “What?”

            “Next year, we’re staying back with the other misfits.”

            “Agreed.”

            “Now shut up and kiss me.”

            “Yes, ma’am.”


	11. 2009

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thanksgiving, 2009

Clint stuffed his keys into his pocket and shoved his coat onto a hanger, thrusting it at the closet and growling as it failed to catch on the pole. A hand reached over his shoulder and Clint stiffened as Maria Hill gently hung up his coat for him. She gave him a knowing look and said quietly, “Don’t lose your shit here. We’ll talk about it on Monday.”

            Clint didn’t know why he was even there. Masochism, maybe. Self-hatred, definitely. He hadn’t missed a Thanksgiving here in all the years that he had been stateside, and he wasn’t going to let _her_ ruin it for him. Then again, he had seen her car in the driveway and he should have known that she wouldn’t have considered not coming here. She didn’t see it the same way that he saw it. This was his family, not hers. They were his first. She should be the one to stay away, sit in her room alone, and watch the damn parade in the dark with a microwaved turkey dinner.

            The image in his head hurt just a little, like a knife in his heart, but he pushed it away as he followed Hill back into the kitchen. Natasha sat at the counter, wearing a black dress too low cut and too fitted to be _Natasha_ entirely. Her ankles were hooked around the back of the bar stool and she turned her wine glass in slow circles on the countertop, only half-listening as Sitwell was recounting one of their more epic missions to a newbie, someone from IT that had pissed Clint off on his first day and so Clint hadn’t bothered to remember his name.

            Clint felt Natasha’s eyes on him as he walked over to the counter, handed Coulson his pre-made casserole, and poured himself a shot of whiskey. He threw it to the back of his throat, and then poured himself another. The kitchen’s noise sank to the sound of something sizzling in the oven and Natasha’s wine glass turning in circles. Coulson stuck the casserole in the oven and asked in a careful, even tone if Clint was driving home.

            “Maybe,” Clint said the cabinets in front of him. “Maybe not.”

            “Don’t be stupid,” Hill said, pushing behind him to wash her hands. “Take it easy.”

            He didn’t listen. He was drunk by dinnertime, and he didn’t care. She was over there, being Natasha, and not being Natasha, all at the same time and she didn’t say a single word to him. Instead, she sent teasing smiles to that noob from IT who was sweating bullets and shooting Clint scared and desperate glances. Clint was pretty sure that the thing that had pissed him off on IT Guy’s first day was something to do with Clint and Natasha as a Thing with a capital T. Now they were not and IT guy thought Clint was going to shove him into another wall.

            Hill took Clint’s keys from him after dinner and said, “I’ll drive you home. We’ll get your car tomorrow.”

            Clint opened his mouth to protest when he heard an icy voice behind him say, “Another excellent life decision, Barton. Reckless and impulsive to the end.”

            He spun around and snapped, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

            Three hours of pent-up frustration and six days of rising confusion, betrayal and anger exploded out of him and he stood a hard, foolish step toward the red-haired woman holding her ground in the middle of Coulson’s foyer. She spat out, “We’re only in this predicament because of a stupid decision you made, Barton.”

            “Barton again?” He invaded her space, staring right into those stupidly beautiful blue eyes. “Want to talk about that stupid decision? Do you?”

            “Barton, Romanov, get a hold of yourself.” Hill stepped close to them, her voice commanding and rigid.

            “That stupid decision is the reason you’re still alive, you dumbass self-sacrificing brainless automaton!”

            She bit off her words when she spat them back at him, “It’s also the reason our mark’s still alive!”

            “We will have another chance to get him, but I can’t undo death, Natasha. I can’t undo death,” he fisted his hair in his hands to avoid punching her. “And that stupid fucking decision is the reason you went to Fury behind my back, behind Hill’s back, and behind Coulson’s back and requested to do separate missions? Without even asking me?”

            “We’re compromised. It’s dangerous.” Her voice could cut glass. Her voice could cut fire. Her voice cut him down to his bone marrow.

            “You know what’s dangerous?” He dropped his voice, so only she could hear him. He watched her eyes track over his face, his mouth, and back up to his eyes. “You, pretending that the person standing in front of me is Natasha. Fuck you.”

            He grabbed his jacket from Hill and stormed out the door. The drive home was silent and cold. He barely managed to thank Hill before slamming the door of his apartment and stumbling into the shower. He threw up and he couldn’t tell if it was from anger and grief or from being drunk off his ass. He scrubbed the vomit off the tiles and out of his mouth and let the water run over him until it ran cold. He lay on the couch in the dark, and finally willed himself to sleep.

            As they had for the last week since the mission, his dreams were of the two possible shots. The mark, and the mark’s second in command with a knife to Natasha’s throat. No matter that the outcome in reality was exactly as it should be, in his dreams, Natasha died. Every time. He woke with a gasp and a groan, his body aching from dehydration. He rubbed his eyes and opened them, freezing as the door to his apartment opened.

            Natasha crept in, shutting the door behind her. She stopped by the entry way, clearly registering that he was awake, and then she crossed to the couch. She sat on the arm, swinging her legs over so her feet rested against each of his shins, her toes curling against his skin through the thin pajama pants. She rested her chin on her hands and studied him for a long moment.

            “We’re a mess,” she said finally.

            Clint closed his eyes. “I know.”

            “I do think we’re compromised, Clint. I think we’re not making mission appropriate decisions in the field because we are,” she hesitated and he opened his eyes, curious. She sighed and shrugged, “wrapped up in our affection for each other.”

            He threw an arm over his eyes. “If it helps, I would have made the same call if it had been Hill.”

            “Would you?”

            She doubted him and Clint knew how he felt about Natasha, but he knew that he had made a mission appropriate decision regardless of who had had the knife to their throat. He didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say.

            “I want to take solo missions. But I don’t think that ends us, in or out of the field,” she said so carefully that Clint had to peer at her over his arm. In the dark, she looked disarmingly young in her yoga pants and old t-shirt, chewing on the end of her ponytail. “I didn’t think you’d be this angry. You didn’t even let me explain.”

            “You didn’t even talk to me first,” he pointed out, careful to balance his tone. She was so controlled that even his hungover addled brain knew he needed to match her in every way he could. “Of course I’m angry.”

            “Why?”

            He hid his face again. “I thought I’d lost you.”

            “Clint,” she said, curling her toes against his legs. “We don’t lose each other.”

            “You punished me for saving your life.”

            “You punished me for being afraid.”

            “You’re afraid of my anger.”

            “Sometimes.”

            “I’m afraid that you won’t let me love you.”

            He swallowed hard at her silence. Then the couch shifted and she crawled down on top of him, stretching out over his sore, bruised, and tired body. She tucked her head in below his chin, her fingers scratching through his scruff, her leg tossed over both of his. He closed his eyes and let his arm come down over top of her. For a long time, they lay there just like that.

            “Sometimes,” Natasha said quietly, her fingers stilling on his cheek, “I don’t know why you love me.”

            He knew what she meant. That she, who didn’t even show up to an annual dinner as herself through and through right now, that she who had killed and murdered for all the wrong reasons and all of the right reasons, that she who flirted and seduced and fucked people to overthrow governments and uncover the world’s dirtiest secrets, that she who saw herself only as a tool for others, would be someone, instead of a something. It was the same way how he couldn’t handle his anger, how he was afraid of it as much as she was afraid of it, and how little he could tolerate the idea of people leaving him.

            He curled his body against hers. “But I do.”

            “I know,” she said, her voice muffled by his chest. “I’m not as afraid of your anger as I am of your love.”

            He pressed his mouth against her hair. “I know. I’m sorry.”

            She wrapped her arms around him. “Me too.”

            After another long moment, as they both had begun to drift to sleep again, he surfaced to whisper, “Happy birthday.”

            “Mmmhmm,” she murmured against his throat, her mouth breaking into a smile.

            “I have a book for you.”

            “Yeah?” She lifted her mouth just slightly.

            “The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman,” he said sleepily. “I had it on audiobook this summer during training. The main character reminds me a little bit of you.”

            “Hard to love?”

            “Easy to love. Stubborn. Sassy. Determined. Cynical. I think she had red hair.”

            “Thank you.”

            “Night, Tasha.”

            “Night, Clint.”


	12. 2010

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thanksgiving, 2010

On the scale of one to ten, Natasha Romanov looked like an eleven even when she didn’t try. When that scale measured how sick she was instead, she overachieved again. Clint sat on the edge of the bed, eyeing the thermometer sticking out of her mouth doubtfully. She was pale, her hair tangled and knotted around her, and her eyes sunken into her face. Sweat dotted her forehead and she had puked twice overnight—once into bed, and the second into a bucket he stuck next to her side of the bed. She was too weak to stand up or move much at all. Still, she was managing to send him quite a fierce glare over the rising number on the tiny thermometer. She had lost her voice at some point too but she was using a pen and paper to write Russian curses that she folded into paper airplanes and threw at him from across the room.

            “One hundred two point six,” said Clint, tugging the thermometer out of her mouth. “Go big and go home, I guess. We’re not going anywhere. Stay still. I’m going to make you some chicken broth.”

            She scribbled on paper and held it up. **Go to Phil’s. I’ll be fine.**

            He shook his head, getting off the bed. “Nat, you’ve never gotten sick before.” She was shaking some sort of paper at him but he pointedly kept his back turned. “It’ll be fine. We’ll have Thanksgiving leftovers tomorrow.”

            A paper airplane sailed past him to join the others on the floor of the living rom as he turned into the kitchen. He texted Coulson: Natasha is sick w/ flu. Staying home. Sorry.

            Coulson texted back: do not envy you. I’ll bring leftovers.

            He made her chicken broth soup and coaxed her to eat a cup of it, before she fell asleep, exhausted and sweaty, against him. He covered her in blankets and settled in to read a book, the football game on mute in front of him, and as she woke sporadically throughout the day, he helped her to and from the bathroom, to the kitchen where she insisted on getting her own water, and back into bed.

            She gave him a suspicious look and croaked, “Stop doting.”

            He grinned at her. “It’s the one time where I can dote and you can’t kick my ass. You better bet your pretty little head that I’m taking advantage.”

            She groaned and shoved his arm enough that chicken soup sloshed all over them. They both glared at each other when they rolled out of bed to change the sheets. Eventually Clint got Natasha to move into the living room and sit somewhat upright which made her turn a shade of green until she faded back to her ghostly gray. He pushed a bowl of chicken soup at her and sat on the other end of the couch, eyeing her suspiciously.

            “You make a good mother hen,” she said, her eyes closed as she lifted a spoon of the soup to her chapped lips.

            “You’re a terrible patient,” he said in return.

            She cracked open an eye and the corner of her mouth twitched. “I know.”

            “You probably got me sick,” he said, his attention caught by the game on TV. “So it’s your turn next, Tash.”

            “You’re on your own, Barton. Get your own bucket.” Her tone teased him but she crawled over to plant a chaste kiss on his cheek. “Leave me the chicken soup recipe.”

            “You like it?” He looked over, surprised.

            She sank back onto her side of the couch. “I’m not sure my taste buds are fully functional but it tastes good right now.”

            Clint rolled his eyes and snorted. “I’m glad you like it.”

            She kicked him with her foot. “Your team’s winning.”

            He smiled. “My team’s not playing today.”

            “The one you like though,” she said sleepily. “The Hawks.”

            “Falcons, kitten,” he said.

            “Same difference,” she murmured and he tried not to punch the air that she allowed him to call her kitten without reprisal.

            Hours later, Natasha would wake up in bed, Clint snoring next to her. There was a wrapped book on her bedside stand. She turned on her light and carefully unwrapped it. In Clint’s small handwriting, like even on paper he was afraid of taking up space, he had written, _“Real. Always. –CB.”_ She turned over the book and ran her hands over the cover. MOCKINGJAY, the third Hunger Games book. She had slept all day and all the previous night so she felt wide awake now. She made herself a cup of tea and propped up a few pillows to begin to read it in bed.

            When Clint woke the day after Thanksgiving, he woke to Natasha’s mouth on his, tears on her cheeks, and he panicked at first, until she whispered against his skin, “Real or not real?”

            He whispered back, “Real.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short one, sorry!


	13. 2011

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thanksgiving, 2011

Clint squinted down the tarmac, his mouth a grimacing line across his face. It was absurdly hot. Thanksgiving was supposed to be cold and snowing, or raining, or miserable in some way or another so that people were encouraged to stay indoors with their loved ones. But this godforsaken spit of land— _“Malibu, Barton,” Coulson said patiently, “It’s not godforsaken. People spend a lot of money to live here.”_ —was hot and bright and though Clint didn’t need to squint to see, he was thinking about his sixteen different pairs of sunglasses and how any of them would be better than the pair that he picked to come here—it was about the thickness of the lense and actually polarizing lenses could really screw with his depth perception and—

            She walked like she was walking on water.

            She was not Natasha.

            She looked like Natasha, but she was not Natasha.

            She held his gaze for a long moment, and then reached back, swept her too-red locks into a ponytail and let her arms drop as she stepped forward, letting herself collide with his body. His arms went around her by instinct.

            “Beach, you, me,” he murmured into her hair. “No Natalie Rushman. No Phil Coulson. No Tony fucking Stark. No Pepper Potts.”

            “Okay.”

            She sounded different. It was her gift, to turn into separate characters at her own whim, but turning into them and turning them off were two different things. Fury had contacted him after he saw Natasha with Stark at the restaurant. He said that she acted like herself, like an Agent, but that there were things that were wrong, like she moved around him like a prim girlish secretary, like her voice was too high with a valley girl swoop to it. Like Natasha was having trouble unwinding.

            _“Where are you?” Fury asked him._

_“Baghdad,” said Clint, standing on a roof in Cairo._

_“Get home.”_

And so the Operation Force Natasha Romanov To Take Her First Holiday had taken precedent over everything else on Clint’s dossier. He had caught the next flight home, watched the end of Tony Stark’s current battle play out on television, and gotten the debriefing from Coulson. And now he was in Malibu, wondering if either him or Natasha could play normal couple for even a few days after being apart for a few months on their own missions, in their own headspaces, witnessing their own tragedies.

            “I’m thinking about adding mojitos to that list,” he said into her hair.

            “Mmm,” she murmured in agreement, not pulling away yet.

            He smiled. “And a bikini.”

            Natasha lifted her head and gave him a doubtful look. “I’m not sure that a bikini’s your most flattering look.”

            He snorted and dropped an arm around her shoulders, guiding her back toward the little puddlejumping plane waiting for them. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve been following all of Cosmo’s instructions for keeping my bikini bod all year round.”

            “Do you taste like cucumber shakes?” She asked, but didn’t wait for an answer, twisting as she rose on her toes, kissing him with a hunger built on questions. He pulled her hips flush against his, and nipped at her lower lip. She smiled against his mouth. “No, thank god. I hate cucumbers.”

            He flew the plane to a small little island owned by a friend of Coulson’s and landed the plane on the water, docking it on the western side before jumping out and securing the plane. Natasha jumped onto the deck next to him and raised her eyebrows as she looked around, her eyes calculating distances and percentages and risks.

            He brushed his fingers over her cheek and she startled. “We’re alone here, love.”

            She pulled his fingers from her face but laced them between hers and didn’t let go. They threw their bags over their shoulders and walked up the dock. There’s a small glass-faced cottage that sits just off the beach. It’s not nearly as ostentatious as the crap back on the mainland that Clint had scowled at as he drove past. It’s furnished simply and carefully, not a chair more than necessary. The fridge, as Coulson promised, was fully stocked. Everything was clean, white, wicker, with blue cushions. A rainbow hammock hung on the screened in porch. Clint dumped their bags on the ground and let Natasha wander through the house, examining the security system and making her risk assessments, while he dug into the fridge. It was their routine. She couldn’t be in a space without knowing it. He couldn’t travel for nine hours without being ravenous at the end.

             When she came back into the kitchen, she looked a little more like Natasha. She wore a black t-shirt and jean shorts, her feet bare. She padded up to him and touched a long scar on his arm. “Cairo?”

            He shrugged. “Just a graze.”

            “How were the kids?” She frowned at his snack of a beer, lunch meats, and a slab of cheese piled on the plate. She pulled an orange out and began to peel it methodically.

            “Talented. Pains in my ass.” He watched her nail slice through the orange skin. “I won’t even ask how Stark was.”

            She paused. “I know why we’re here.”

            He lifted his eyes to meet her blue gaze. The ocean outside had nothing on her. “We’re here as long as you want to be here.”

            She put an orange slice in her mouth, and grinned so it was nothing but orange slice smile. He grinned at her. She bit into the slice, and stepped forward, kissing him carefully, her hand on his chest. “Okay.”

            A day passed. Two days passed. Three days passed. They didn’t touch other than careful kisses exchanged in safe and neutral spaces, the kitchen, the hallway, the porch. He watched her carefully, but didn’t push her. She read, mostly, her feet dug in the sand. She stared out at the ocean occasionally. At night, she drank tea on the porch and fell asleep in the hammock. He didn’t move her. The nights were warm enough that he could just drape a thin blanket over top of her and go back into bed alone.

            “I think what bothers me most,” she said, finally, “is that I see myself in Stark.”

            Clint looked up from where he was making them sandwiches. “You’re nothing like Tony Stark, Natasha.”

            “We’re both brilliant. We’re both incredibly damaged—no, stop, you can love me despite me being damaged but I’m damaged, Clint—and we’re both incredibly ambitious.”

            He blinked a little. “I don’t know that I’d ever have used ambitious to describe you.”

            “I am, in my own way,” she said, without elaboration. She shook her head a bit, turning a red curl around her finger. Already the color was fading from that strange red with the purple undertones to her normal fiery red. “I empathized with him. And that bothered me. I’ve never felt compromised in the field before with someone who wasn’t you.”

            Clint’s heart slammed to a stop in his chest. “Oh.”

            Natasha’s head jerked up and she jumped off her stool so fast it clattered to the ground as she swung around the island counter and grabbed his shirt front. “Not. Not like that. I can empathize with someone and feel compromised without being in love with them, Clint.”

            Clint wanted to pull her against him but didn’t dare. He leaned his head forward, touching their foreheads together. “Let’s skip the part where I was an insecure jackass and get back to the part where you think the problem was that you and Tony Stark are long lost siblings.”

            She laughed a bit, and allowed him his moment. She kissed his chin. “It’s Thanksgiving.”

            He nodded, pressing his chin into her mouth. He delighted in any touch from her. “Happy birthday. Happy Thanksgiving.”

            “Come swim with me,” she whispered, teasing him as her fingers loosened on his shirt.

            He shook his head. “Natasha.”

            “Come swim,” she said, and turned around, walking away from him and toward the door. She pulled her shirt up and over her head in an easy movement, slipping out of her shorts in the same fashion. “I’m me, Clint. You can touch.”

            It took him a moment. But he caught up. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, I LIKED writing this one.


	14. 2012

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thanksgiving, 2012

Clint did not want to do Thanksgiving that year. Or any year. Maybe no holidays ever again. When he suggested that idea to Natasha, she shot it down the way he took Chitauri out of the sky six months ago, and the way Loki shot him down nightly in his dreams. She told him that it’d be good for him and if she had to drag him downstairs, she would. He didn’t doubt that she’d follow through on her threat. In the months after New York, she had embraced the Avengers idea. They lived in the Tower now, after all. He lived there because Natasha lived there. It had not been a mutual decision. He, however, was still a little lukewarm on the idea. Neither the Avengers nor SHIELD had put him back into the field yet. He felt useless, weak, and the idea of a holiday that reminded him of the people he killed— _“You weren’t your own person, Clint.”_ —made him want to vomit.

“I’m going to vomit,” he said in the elevator.

Natasha’s mouth tightened. “You’re not going to vomit.”

He wanted to be petulant but couldn’t find it in him. They were the first ones into the kitchen because Natasha had volunteered them to do the turkey. That had always been Coulson’s job and Clint strongly suspected that Natasha found this to be some sort of demented _therapy_.

Clint squinted at the bird in the fridge. “JARVIS, first step.”

“Put the bird in the sink, sir.” It was annoying how much nicer Stark’s AI was than Stark himself.

Clint put the bird in the sink while Natasha pulled out a food processor. Naturally, she got the fun part with knives. Clint glanced over at her. “You know that we could just order it in and JARVIS would probably lie for us.”

“It seems wrong to ask artificial intelligence to lie for us,” Natasha answered, frowning at a cookbook.

“On the contrary, Agent Romanov,” said JARVIS. “Mr. Stark asks me to lie for him on a daily basis.”

Clint snorted and a ghost of a smile crossed Natasha’s lips. They worked around each other in a comfortable silence and though Clint’s heart seized every time he thought about the upcoming dinner, he found that cooking quieted his thoughts and he fell into the rhythm of preparing the meal side by side with a woman who clearly knew how to handle a knife. They bumped into each other, rarely spoke, and when they did, it was always about games and puns and jokes told on missions or at previous Thanksgiving.

The others trickled down, one by one. Jane and Thor, with Darcy inserting commentary about Jane’s Thanksgiving story. Steve staring at Darcy. Bruce squinting at the turkey doubtfully while Clint scowled at him. Tony and Pepper arguing about table settings and whether or not a robot should set the table. It was loud and calm, disorganized and tidy, perfectly normal. It was like a magnified version of the normal Tower meals.

            At some point, they all went up to their rooms in waves to change for supper. Natasha stood in the bathroom, trying to hook a pearl necklace Clint had given her for Christmas a few years ago. He stepped up behind her and hooked it for her, pressing a kiss to the back of her neck.

            “Hi, you,” she said to his mirror reflection.

            “Hey,” he said.

            She ruffled his hair. “Think you’ll be okay?”

            He said yes, even though he wasn’t sure. She gave him a knowing look and went over to her bedside table, pulling open the drawer. She handed him a present and he tilted his head, taking it slowly. “It’s _your_ birthday, Natasha. Not mine.”

            “It’s Thanksgiving. Maybe we should always be giving presents for words we don’t know how to say,” she said carefully, sitting on the edge of the bed. She pinned up the rest of her hair, avoiding his eyes.

            He turned over the package in his hand. “Should I open it now?”

            “If you want.”

            “Then you get yours now.” He fetched her wrapped book from his side of the bed and they sat side by side on the mattress, unwrapping presents like it was Christmas and not a holiday about religious freedom, smallpox, and whatever else Darcy was trying to explain to Thor downstairs. Clint ran his hands across the cover of the book she had given him. “The Wind in the Willows.”

            “It was one of the first books Phil gave me,” she said, reaching over to open the inside cover where in simple green pen, Coulson had scrawled, _one of my favorites for one of my favorites, -P.C._ “I thought you’d like it now.”

            He couldn’t stop staring at it. At the inscription. At wanting to lay in bed with Natasha and read it all day. She lifted the book in her hand a little. “Gone Girl.”

            “Psych thriller thing,” he murmured absentmindedly. “I read her previous books. She’s twisted.”

            “Like me?”

            He looked at her and grinned. “Scarier than you.”

            Natasha made a disbelieving noise and shook her head, putting her book on the table and taking Clint’s from his hands and setting it on top of hers. “Time to go downstairs.”

 

Downstairs, the party was starting up in earnest. In that Stark was a little tipsy and there was a dart board with a sign that said, EVERYONE BUT HAWKEYE. Clint rolled his eyes. Darts weren’t fun because they weren’t a challenge anymore. Stark’s dart board was safe.

“I invited a few people,” Natasha said, stirring the spiced apple cider in the pot. She didn’t look up, though Clint knew that she must know that all of their eyes, including his, were staring at her. “I hope that’s okay.”

Stark looked at Clint who shrugged. He didn’t know that Natasha had invited anyone. Whatever she did, it was on her accord. And shortly after Stark told Natasha, doubtfully, that it was fine, and he went back to explaining Thanksgiving turkey pardons to Steve who apparently hadn’t heard of them, the doorbell rang. Pepper and Jane both excused themselves to answer the door. Clint stuck a thermometer in the turkey.

“You invited _SHIELD_?” Stark shouted, and the sound of chairs being pushed back filled the dining room space. “What in the name of all that is our binding contract is---“

“We all used to do Thanksgiving at Coulson’s,” Natasha said, not turning around. “I figured they’d need a place to come too.”

Clint’s throat closed at Coulson’s name but he put down the thermometer and moved behind Natasha to press another kiss to the back of her bare neck. She smiled, lifted a hand to touch his cheek, accepting his wordless gratitude. Then he went to greet his friends.

Later, Clint stood in the doorway, watching the whole crowd interact. He didn’t deserve any of this, and he didn’t want to leave it either. Natasha caught his eye across the room and made her way toward him, leaving her champagne on a countertop so she could slip both arms around him and hold him for one moment. He closed his eyes, her red hair caressing his face.

She turned a bit in the circle of his arms, still leaning into him. He liked this now. Where they were out in the open with each other. He needed her then, in these spaces of loneliness and grief, where he couldn’t hold onto anyone else. She said softly, “Ever put together a puzzle without the flat edged pieces?”

He couldn’t speak. He just shook his head against hers. Her fingers tightened against his where his hands settled on her stomach, keeping her from walking away. “I used to try. All the time, just for fun.”

He loved her.

She jutted her chin at the people in front of them. “Even without all the flat-edged pieces, you can still make a pretty picture.”

They stayed on the periphery of the party for most of the night. Natasha was always meant to be in the center. It’s where she felt most comfortable, changing faces as fast as she changed places, her eyes always moving to all of the exits. But he was always on the outside, silent and watchful, and it’s where he wanted to be tonight. Watching over this haphazard, broken, montage of people who were never meant to be whole but together, were. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whoops! I miscounted. One more year to go :)

**Author's Note:**

> Title inspired by the Greg Laswell song. Here are the lyrics!
> 
> Oh who would have  
> Ever known this?  
> Could be this easy  
> I was a long, long way off  
> Then just like that it was over  
> Everything I knew of love  
> I was a long, long way off
> 
> And I think I like  
> How the day sounds  
> Like how the day sounds  
> Through this new song
> 
> Thank you for opening the window  
> The sky is clear as my mind is now  
> I was a long, long way off  
> Join me in welcoming the sun in  
> It's much brighter  
> Than the night I hid in  
> I was a long, long way off
> 
> And I think I like how  
> The day sounds  
> Like how the day sounds  
> Through this new song  
> And I think I like how  
> The day sounds  
> Like how the day sounds  
> Through this new song
> 
> From a long way down
> 
> Yeah, it's well worth the time  
> That it's taken to get here now  
> Yeah, it's well worth the time  
> That it's taken to get here now
> 
> Ba da dum
> 
> So go ahead and bang a gong  
> Nothing can drown  
> Out the sound  
> And the whisper of my love
> 
> And I think I like how  
> The day sounds  
> Like how the day sounds  
> Through this new song  
> And I think I like how  
> The day sounds  
> Like how the day sounds  
> Through this new song  
> Through this new song  
> Through this new song
> 
> And the blinds  
> Have all been drawn  
> I know where I belong  
> Where I belong,  
> Where I belong  
> And the blinds  
> Have all been drawn  
> I know where I belong  
> Where I belong
> 
> And I think I like  
> How the day sounds  
> Like how the day sounds  
> Through this new song  
> And I think I like how  
> The day sounds  
> Like how the day sounds  
> Through this new song
> 
> (4x) Oh, won't you sing along  
> Oh, my love  
> Won't you sing along


End file.
